You see a lot of crazy stuff in the medical field. However, working as a woman in the medical field comes with its own specific type of problems. These female medical professionals share the moments where a male patient also made them question the male species.
(Content has been edited for clarity).
Only A Female Doctor Could Fix His “Special” Problem
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“While still in residency (family medicine), an older male patient came in complaining of trouble peeing, so I performed a prostate exam. The prostate felt normal, so I gave him a lab form to test PSA and sent him on his way, no biggie.
Then later that morning one of the female doctors in the practice came to me all ‘oh my god you saw mister A today, I should’ve warned you! Was it trouble peeing or rectal bleeding this time?’
It turned out that with every new female doctor in the practice, this guy made sure to get a rectal exam. For all other problems, he always requested one of the male doctors.”
He Seemed Like Such A Nice Kid But…
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“One night the cops brought this guy in from a holding cell at the station. He was complaining of respiratory distress, but it was more of a panic attack. At first, I felt bad for him. He was a young guy, and he told me this was the first time he’d ever been in legal trouble, he said he’d gotten high and ‘made a mistake.’ I remember hoping that whatever he’d done wasn’t all that serious as he seemed like a nice kid.
Then I overheard the officers talking outside his room. It turns out he had confessed to violating and beating a woman who had been into our ER earlier that day for a SANE exam. I had briefly been her nurse as well, so I knew all the details of what had happened, and it was pretty horrifying.
Having to be nice to him for the last hour of my shift was more draining than the 11 hours that came before it.”
His Request Spelled Out Serious Danger
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“I was changing a disabled patient’s disposable underwear and applying some cream to his groin (like the stuff you put on babies with nappy rash) when he motioned for me to pass his communication card so he could spell out his request. I had to watch in horror as he slowly spelled out ‘W-A-N-K M-E,’ still holding his urine-soaked underwear in my gloved hands.”
She Couldn’t Help But Smile When This Patient Finally Left
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“I’m a Night RN. I had a patient who would constantly push the call light. When you go in to answer it, he would have his hospital gown pulled up and his junk out. Then he would make dirty comments.
He would sit on the edge of the bed with himself exposed so everyone in the unit could see his junk. When we tried to close the curtain, he would yell ‘Nurse open the curtain.’
We told him he needed to stop exposing himself. He would respond that he was hot or the gown was uncomfortable and that he didn’t care if anyone sees him as if he was not actively trying to flash himself intimately. We quickly got tired of his crap and were upset every time he hit his call light.
Then he started complaining that the nurses were witches and nobody would smile when speaking to him. In our facility, you have to go into the room to cancel the light. We started just going in and hitting the light without making eye contact. Or speaking to him.
We quickly only assigned male nurses to care for him. Each time he was assigned a male nurse he would demand a different nurse but would not state the reason. The charge wouldn’t stand for it and would not change his assignment. Anytime a female nurse would pass his room he would demand that she come in and help him.
As he was being wheeled out for discharge, he saw me having a conversation with someone, and I laughed and smiled at a comment. The patient interrupted us and said in a very passive aggressive manner ‘so you can smile, I love to see a pretty girl smile.’
I looked at him deadpan and said I’m smiling because he is leaving. He gave me a dirty look.”
His Words Alone Made Her Sick To Her Stomach
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“I was about 20 and working as a Nursing Assistant at a hospital. A guy in his late 40s/50s came in for something relatively routine.
He spilled his urinal in bed, I cleaned him up, and he started needing to pee like every 20 minutes after that. He started saying things that are inappropriate like ‘Does your father know what you do for work?’ ‘You like working here?’ ‘Your boyfriend probably doesn’t like this.’
This went on for hours until I told my nurse, a middle-aged Mormon going through a divorce due to cheating. She went in, and, he not only didn’t have any more accidents, but he also didn’t ring the rest of the night.
I’ve dealt with a ton of inappropriate things since then. I’ve been assaulted at work and had things thrown at me and rude comments but none that made me feel sick the way that guy made me feel.”
This Patient Had A Hard Time With Rejection
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“While I was still in dental school, I had a 50-ish-year-old male patient who needed quite a bit of work. At our second appointment together, he bit me (definitely intentionally in retrospect). I got bitten all the time (it’s a hazard of the job), so I made my usual joke about needing to keep my fingers and kept working on his tooth. A minute later he started sucking on my fingers in an obviously intimate way, so I quickly finished up the filling I was working on and let him go for the day before reporting him to the patient coordinator.
I got him switched to a male student (god forbid we dismiss a patient for something like that when he has money to give us). A few weeks later I passed the patient and his new student in the hallway. By the time I saw him coming, it was too late to change direction. The patient made a beeline for me and crossed his arms over his chest and pushed my body up against the wall, whispered ‘miss you,’ and walked away. I was graduating a few weeks later, so I didn’t do anything about it, but he’s probably some other poor little dental student’s problem now.”
Most Days She Didn’t Take Work Home, But She Couldn’t Forget The Words He Said
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“I’m an ER RN. I had a patient on our psych ward one time who was having a psychotic episode, clearly very delusional. I’m a redhead, and thus I have white skin. This guy’s room was directly across from my desk, and he stood in his doorway making statements about how pale girls got him hard.
Once his behavior escalated, he stepped into the hallway in nothing but a sheet tied around his waist, and it was very apparent that he had not exaggerated his fetish for pale girls.
He continued to make horrendous intimate remarks about me for the next hour until the sedatives I’d given him kicked in.
There’s something just horrifying about being intimately harassed in front of your colleagues and not being able to do anything about it. That was the longest hour of my life. I felt so humiliated by the end of it, in addition to the fact that I was afraid of this guy; he was much larger than I am.
Most days I don’t take work home with me, but I won’t deny that I angry-cried on my way home that night.”
His Questions Were Just Way Too Personal
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“I work in healthcare. We have one particular patient who was a total creep.
Things started off innocent enough, he was having a procedure on his prostate and called and asked about pre and post op care – and asked about touching himself and if it was ok to do post procedure. A pretty normal question. No biggie. I answered his questions and hung up. Thought nothing of it.
A few minutes later I had to call down to another staff member about his paperwork; she mentions that she just spoke to him – sure enough… he had called her to ask about touching himself and going on about how he didn’t know how long he could hold off.
Ok, odd, but maybe he wanted a second opinion.
Next day I’m talking to the girl from his urologists office, and she tells me how he kept asking her about touching herself – she got uncomfortable and told him to talk to his male doctor about it – which she mentioned to the doctor after and was shocked to find he didn’t utter a word to the doctor.
So fast forward to his appointment, I meet him – but he doesn’t put two and two together that he spoke to me on the phone, and again asks me about touching himself. Presenting the same questions he has asked at least four women that I know of as if he is asking the first time. I’m repulsed, he is a creep and just wants to talk about jerking it to women. I excuse myself, and he is put out for his procedure.
Sure enough, creepo calls me the next day to talk about touching himself again.”
What Is That?!
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“A 90-year-old, demented man grabbed me by the shirt and started punching me over and over again in my ribs, like really hard. I was screaming for help, and finally, two other nurses pulled him off of me. I had huge bruises where he punched me, and it hurt to move for a while. I was just trying to disconnect his IV antibiotics.
When I was in nursing school, I worked as a nurse’s aide in an assisted living facility. I went into a patient’s room to change his bed sheets while he sat in his recliner watching. He asked me how old I was and I told him (I was like 20), and he asked if I was married yet, and I said no. Then he asked if I’ve ‘ever known the loving of a man.’ I just looked at him weird and ignored it. Then he kept saying, ‘You could if you wanted to, you know. I could show you.’ Then I looked, and he had his flaccid old man junk hanging out of his pajama pants. He winked at me, licked his lips and said ‘sit on it.’ I ran out of there pretty fast and got the old lady LPN to deal with him. In hindsight, I wish I would have laughed at him and said ‘sit on what?!’
Thankfully I work in L&D now and just deal with women and their babies. Much more pleasant.”
His Way Of Flirting Definitely Wasn’t Getting Anywhere With This Nurse
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“There was a 50 Chaldean male, and I am a 20-something female. I had been a nurse for about a year and a half. Average day, this guy was doing great and getting discharged. The whole morning he was up pacing his room with his dress pants on and no shirt on. Every time I’d enter the room he would start rubbing his very hairy chest and stretch as if trying to show off his chest or shoulders or something. I just got the sense he was trying to come off as assertive or masculine or something.
He was not in good shape by any means. He had a big belly of sorts. I was working on a regular medical floor at the time, and he came in with diabetic ketoacidosis. Discharge teaching revolved around healthy eating, taking blood glucose, insulin administration, etc. As always I went over instructions/scripts with him then I always ask if they have any questions. He started asking if diabetes will affect his libido because he feels he has a lot of vigor and would hate to see that gone. I told him that it’s true impotence is a very real complication of uncontrolled blood sugar. But as far any question about his drive he should be sure to bring up to his doctor at his follow up.
Before he left he gave me his business card and it had his personal number on it as well. He said give him a call if I had any needs in his business and if I ever wanted to go out with him. Nothing about this is out of the ordinary yet. Some guys act ridiculous around us all the time. I can’t begin to tell you what a culture shock being a nurse is. But a day or two after this guy is sent home, I’m randomly in a patient room and my work phone rings. I answer to find it’s the guy I had discharged. He called our unit and asked for me.
It’s regular practice to just push a call through to the nurse someone asks for. He begins going on and on about his junk and how it’s not as sensitive as it was once and when he pushes down on it it turns red and purple. I know there was more he described but it kind of felt unreal. I interrupted him and asserted that if he felt he had a problem it was appropriate to go see his primary physician and this by no means was an appropriate call. Once a patient is discharged it isn’t appropriate to call a nurse about anything let alone something that isn’t even related to the care they were receiving. And especially this topic.
Over the next few hours, he called back several times describing his junk in more and more detail. Eventually I was able to get the unit secretary to catch his number and she wouldn’t send the calls through. A few days later a different secretary was working and sent the calls through again. He did the same thing describing his junk. I just hung up and this time called my manager and security and wrote up a report about the incident. There were strict standing rules at the front desk that if his number called the call was to be sent directly to security. It became known as the man’s junk report around the unit. The kicker of it all is that I’m a lesbian and no there is absolutely no way he could have known.”
She Couldn’t Even Do Her Job Because Of These Crazy Patients
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“This was at an assisted living facility during a NOC shift. I was one of the three total staff on for the night. This is while I was a CNA, every patient had Alzheimer’s/dementia. This patient was known to act out intimately (A lot of males with Alzheimer’s do this). Another staff did come eventually, but it was to see why I hadn’t finished the round. They brought him back to his room.
The male patient tried to strangle me when I was trying to lead him out of the common area because he was urinating all over the floor.
I had another patient, a very large German man who was a foot taller than me and outweighed me by 75 pounds. I was doing my rounds, and I found him in another patient’s room with his pants off and junk out. The patient was sleeping luckily. I said the German guy’s name, and he whipped around so hard I’m surprised he didn’t fall. And then he started running up to me. I ran out of the room and ran to the dining room. It was the only room (other than a patient’s room) that had doors that closed and locked. I locked the door, and he caught up a few seconds later. This dude starts punching the door and trying to break through the glass. I thought for sure he was going to break the door down. Luckily he eventually stopped. Then he stared at me through the glass for almost an hour, waiting for me to come out.”
That Doesn’t Go In There!
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“A guy came into urgent care with pain in his junk. I took a look and saw something that looked like a string in his urethral opening. So naively I thought maybe some thread of his clothes had gotten into his urethra and was causing irritation. So I went to get it out with some tweezers… And pulled about six-centimeter of string out of there with little beads on it.”
Thankfully An Old Physician Was Superman In This Situation
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“As an ER nurse, so many things happened. But, the episode that keeps haunting me happened in nursing school. I had to bathe a 40-year-old who was perfectly capable of bathing himself. He suddenly popped out of bed, and I attempted to get out of the way by moving toward the head of the bed—WRONG move. I was pinned in. He grabbed me, pushed me down on my knees and tried to thrust his swinging junk in my face while saying ‘suck it girl.’
I was screaming for help. Some elderly physician arrived first and took the guy out with a kidney punch. I’ll never forget either man.”
If She Wanted Sympathy She Shouldn’t Have Gone To Her Boss For It
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“I’m a Nurse, and when I worked in a nursing home, we had an old man with mild dementia who was well known for getting handsy with any female he came across. One day my boss told me to take him away from the front door so he wouldn’t bother visitors. He was sitting there napping quietly in the sun, bothering nobody. When I woke him up and told him to come with me, he thought I was coming on to him. He started following me around and trying to corner me, touch me, etc. I made a poor decision to sit in a chair, in an attempt to get him to sit in the chair next to me. With my face now at groin height, he took his chance, grabbed my head and smashed my face into his old man private area.
When I told my boss about it, she said it wasn’t assault because he had dementia and refused to report it. My boss told me I needed to be more resilient and just get over it, these things happen when you’re a nurse.”
He Turned The Hospital Into A Rodeo
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“A male patient yanked the call light out of the wall, swung it around his head like a lasso, and yelled at us all as we tried to calm him down ‘Get ‘er, lil piggys!’ He’d been making fat jokes at every woman who came in. Ducking a call light remote whipping through the air ain’t no joke.
He did this twice more during my shift. Our bells make a very loud, insistent, rapid dinging when they are pulled out of the wall, which just adds to the fun of that particular rodeo.
It was the first and only time I ever saw a supervisor okay someone to not have a call bell. I doubt legal appreciated that, but the rest of us sure as heck did.”
This Crazy Patient Literally Treated The Hospital Like Crap
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“A male patient crapped all over the bed and asked if I like the smell. He then proceeded to explain in explicit detail why he enjoyed it and would likely have another episode that night. He liked to sleep with it, and it took the ER head nurse and multiple others along with myself to convince him to let us clean it up. (You could smell it from everywhere in the ER, words cannot describe how vile).”
This Patient Wanted To Be Treated Like The Dang King
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“Most of my time in a hospital, the men could be a little creepy or the confused ones would do gross things, but the worst was a 20-something Type 1 diabetic guy. He had no mental illness or deficit. He was in the hospital for uncontrolled blood sugar and was throwing a fit because he wanted a hamburger and fries for lunch. I told him that the hospital does not serve that, but if he wanted family/friends to bring food in for him, that was allowed. When lunchtime came, I carried his tray into his room and set it on his table. He took the cover off, and much to his dismay it was a chicken sandwich and vegetables. He asked ‘what is this?’ and as I turned to respond, he chucked the chicken sandwich at my face.
I no longer work in a hospital.”
This Nurse Had To Face Her Literal Demon
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“I’ve got all the usual punched, bitten and groped stories. Sectarian abuse from men who have dementia and don’t realize the troubles ended 20 years ago (I am in Northern Ireland).
The worst story isn’t mine, but a young nurse I worked with. She was in the gastro ward, so lots of addicts and people with drinking problems.
She had to nurse the man who violated her as a kid. The most hurtful thing was that this guy couldn’t figure out who she was because he was a wasted old man. I don’t know how she kept it together.”
He Didn’t Want This Moment To Go To Waste
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“I had a patient in his 20s with sickle cell anemia and a substance abuse problem. He ended up hospitalized with serious priapism (an arousal he can’t get rid of), and the thing was basically like a two-liter bottle in his lap. I was there assisting the doctor with draining the blood every few hours as needed. Prior to round three of the draining procedure, he pulled me close to his bed and said, ‘Can you just try to ride it before that butthole drains it again? It’ll never be this big again, and it’d be sad to let it go to waste.’ I noped right out of that and had my male colleague take over for the rest of the shift.”
A Few Bad Experiences Turned Her Into An Absolute Boss Nurse
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“Kind of funny but when I was a baby nurse working at an inpatient psych hospital, there was a male patient openly touching himself in the lounge area.
Of course, I had no idea what to do, but my co-worker grabbed a bottle of lotion, walked over and handed it to him, and said gruffly, ‘Go to your room.’
I got my turn later on working as an NP when I was called out to see an old guy with a drinking problem in the ER who was touching his junk under a sheet while I was trying to interview him. It was the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and I didn’t feel like dealing with any more crap. I just said in a mean voice ‘Um, you need to stop what you’re doing and listen to me.’ Ahhh, what a difference a few years of experience and maturity makes!”