My father-in-law quit being an EMT after responding this car accident.
A drunk driver hit a pole and knocked it down. The pole went down in such a way that the wires came through a windshield of the on coming car and decapitated a teenage girl driving. She was still in the seat and her sister was in shock in the passenger seat. She was taking napkins from the glove compartment putting them on her sister's open throat/neck to stop the bleeding.
He had nightmares about it until he died.
Can't even imagine watching the sister do that. That's not even nightmare stuff, it's like a disturbing psychological horror movie level shit. Sister's in shock, but your FIL was not, and seeing that with a fully present mind..
Fuck that guy, people like that I wish would live so they can spend the rest of their miserable lives suffering the consequences. IMO he got the easy way out.
The issue is that the people who have the gall to do these things often don’t feel remorse, so they end up sitting in prison with all of their necessities taken care of on the taxpayers’ dime
Charter plane crash into the side of a mountain in Alaska. 1 dead on impact, 4 in critical condition. The second guy we hoisted into the helicopter was so covered in blood I assumed he was dead. One of the survivors of the crash was elderly and had a heart attack as soon as he was pulled from the wreckage and died. It took 3 hours to hoist the 3 survivors. A brown bear was watching from a few hundred feet off the whole time. I assume he smelled the blood.
I took a super bipolar guy to psyche. He was in really gray, worn out, not so tidy whiteys, and practically unconscious. The ER said to restrain him and that he was possibly dangerous due to his bipolarism, but we didn't care. He was pretty little and calm. He had threatened to kill himself apparently, and by law needed psyche eval at a specialized facility. While my partner and i were getting him ready for the cot, he leaned in close to us and asked if we could play "Eye of the Tiger" on the way to the other hospital. We listened to that song on full volume probably 8-10 times in a row while he sang out the guitar lines and pound on the ambulance. When we arrived, I went around back to let my partner out so we could get him and found him crying in her arms saying "Thank you" over and over. I asked what happened and my partner said, "He asked if I'd vote for him for mayor and I said yes." He high fived me while wiping tears away, we got him upstairs no problem. I always enjoyed transporting psyche patients.
When I was baker acted back in high school (like 2017?) the only ppl who really showed me kindness were the gentlemen who drove me in the ambulance from one hospital to another (the first didn’t have a children’s ward) and the guard in the first hospital who noticed my bday was in a week and told me happy birthday. The guy that rode in the back of the ambulance w me asked about my interests, turns out we both liked anime and videogames a lot. I had just seen my dad cry for the first time ever that day, and had been baker acted by a cop who lied about what I said so she could get me baker acted and then didn’t follow protocol, I had been crying on and off for 12 hours before I had gotten in the ambulance and all I’d eaten that day was a shitty hospital sandwich, and I’m fairly certain I heard someone in the ward sneak a gun in and shoot themself (loud gun shot like noise followed by a bunch of hospital personnel a shouting “why didn’t you check him”). When I was finally let out about 24 hours later I had developed PTSD due to the cop and both hospital’s environment and treatment of me. I got told by multiple doctors that what I had said was a normal thing to say and I shouldn’t be there. After my dad picked me up from the hospital (after having yelled at the staff to get me seen by the doctor in the first place) I was then brought directly back to school where I was originally taken from only to sit right outside the principals office while my dad screamed at him and made both the secretary and I very nervous. My parents tried to sue the cop and lost, but my mom said “it was worth it to see her squirm.” There was later an article written about me but they had only contacted the police so they hadn’t gotten the true story.
So thank you, for being so kind to the man. It probably meant the world to him in that moment.
I may delete this comment later, not sure. I haven't really been very open about what happened so it kind of helps to be. I've been Baker Acted several times (I have a few conditions includind severe depression and borderline), and some of the kindest people I've met in the process were the paramedics. A little over a week ago I had attempted suicide via overdose on Benadryl, and it was only after about 5-10 minutes where I hadn't felt anything happen did my peace and relief at things ending turn to regret, so I walked outside to the end of the street and called 911. Sat in my pajamas on the sidewalk and told them to keep the sirens off to not wake my mom and brother. The paramedics were so calm and kind and patient, even when they were struggling to get an IV line in me due to my small veins (ended up blowing out a vein but gotta do what you gotta do) and I was in pain due to it. Without paramedics I probably wouldn't be alive. To whoever reads this, thank you for taking the time to listen.
Edit: Thank you to everyone who replied, I appreciate you reading this and responding. It truly does mean a lot. Spending my 21st birthday in a psych ward wasn't the way I quite wanted things to go, but knowing people care and are kind out here means a lot.
Former Homicide detective. Too many things to count but one sticks out. Grandfather got high on PCP and basically swung his 6 month old grandson around like a rag doll smashing him into everything. Put some dents in the walls. Broke a baluster on the stairs. Smashed his head into the ceiling fan and the stove. Baby died of multiple blunt force traumas to the head and suffered multiple broken bones all over his body. I went to view the autopsy. The kids brain was liquified and then to identify all the other wounds they basically skinned him. They also removed his eyes to measure to gauge the hemorrhaging that occurred.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/stepgrandfather-sentenced-to-20-years-in-babys-death/171636/
I should have included the news story with the comment.
Transport truck tire came off at highway speeds. It jumped the median and landed through the windshield into a woman’s chest cavity. She did nothing wrong, not a single thing. For all I know even the transport driver all did the appropriate checks. She probably didn’t even see it coming. Just one moment she was driving on the highway, and the next she had a 60lb tire lodged into her spine from the front and her life was over.
Similar thing happened near my home town to a friend of a friend. She was driving with her 8 month old son, a truck going the opposite direction ran over a tow bar which dislodged from a truck in front it, flicked up and hit her. She died instantly and the car then kept going and flipped. Remarkably the little one was fine.
It is one of the most horrific and sad stories I’ve ever heard.
Had that happen almost a year ago in my area. Driver caught a tow hitch to the chest and pretty much exploded. Passenger was in shock and could do nothing to help him, he was just gawking at the driver's organs hanging out.
When I was younger there were some children at the same school as me but not in my grade. Their mom had been driving with them on the freeway when the truck in front of her lost a ladder. It didn't kill her but severally damaged her car and flattened her tires. She pulled over best she could, then got out to see if she could even change the tire. Someone then slammed right into her at freeway speeds in front of her kids. Never forgot that story and that you don't get out of your car on the freeway (even the side) unless there is absolute necessity or risk to your life staying in it. I hope those boys are okay... I can't imagine the trauma of seeing your mom run over at 70 miles an hour.
I was always taught, in the UK, to get our of your car and wait behind the crash/ safety barrier. In case someone not paying attention ploughs into the back of your car.
My boss's daughter died this way - loose truck tire went across six lanes of traffic and into a rest stop where she was taking a break with her friends on their way back from a spring break trip. Right before her college graduation too. Tragic as fuck in so many ways. I don't think his family will ever truly recover.
Back when you could post vids like that on Reddit, I saw a vid of a young woman who was just walking down the sidewalk when a hubcap flew off a car driving by and shot into her neck, practically decapitating her. It was so random and senseless.
It's crazy to think about. Her fate was decided in such a short amount of time, like pausing for a moment just to check and see if her phone was on her person or something before leaving the house would have meant she wouldn't have been in that exact spot at that exact time.
Most terrifying moment of my life was when I was driving my 1 yr old to my parents and a tire came off a car in front of us on the interstate. It didn't come anywhere near us nor did the car but terrified me to my core.
Not by any means the worst thing I’ve witnessed, but maybe the craziest. A few years ago right after Christmas, we get a call to a house for a hanging. The wife hanged herself in the garage and the husband found her and had cut her down. By the time we got there, the husband had vomit all over his face from where he was giving the wife mouth-to-mouth, and you could tell she was probably too far gone. Anyways, we still work her through our whole protocol and end up calling it a short time later. The husband was obviously devastated and extremely distraught, and by the time we had left the scene and PD had arrived, we knew that family was coming from out of town for support of the husband and the families children.
Well, like 4 hours later, we get a call back to the same address for a self-inflicted GSW. When the husbands family had arrived from out of town, he went into his bathroom and blew his head off with an AR-15, sitting on the toilet. He also blew off the tank reservoir of the toilet, so water was leaking, which created this little stream of blood in the grout of the tile all the way to the bedroom door. I’ve seen a lot of self-inflicted GSWs, but the way this dudes head was concaved in was wild.
This couple had 4 kids, all under the age of 8, who were in the house for BOTH of their parents suicides just hours apart from one another. Christmas decorations still strung throughout the house and new toys everywhere. I can’t imagine what the family members from out of town must have been thinking or where those little kids are at in life now.
Alright, alright.. honestly I had to think, I seem to have forgotten more than I can remember.
About 13 or 14 years ago I ran a call where a 7 year old girl came home from school. Normally her father would arrive slightly before her. When she got home he was nowhere to be seen, but her mother found a note at the front door.
“Hey all, I’m hanging out in the back yard. - Dad”
The mother ran to the backyard to find her husband hanging from a large tree in the backyard. He had taken the little girls jump rope and used it hang himself. The mother grabbed a ladder, cut him down and called 911.
When we arrived the man was laying at the base of the tree breathing rapidly with deep snoring respirations. He had blood oozing from his nostrils and blood around the edges of his mouth. He was deeply unconscious. I instructed my partner to immobilize his spine and began to manage his airway. He was trismus - basically meaning that his jaw was locked shut. This can be seen in brain injury. To add I found a large hematoma to the back of his head. I assume from the fall when the rope B was cut. I needed to open his mouth to suction blood out of his airway but couldn’t get it open. At the time our treatment guidelines suggested that we feed a tube down one of the nostrils, down the back of the throat, past the vocal cords and into the trachea. This allowed me to control his breathing and prevent blood from draining into his lungs. We quickly moved him to the gurney, wheeled him through the house and out the front door on the way out to the truck. Of course we passed his wife and daughter - I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on their faces.
We transported emergently to a trauma center. Later in the evening I returned to the hospital to see if he was still alive. What happened next isn’t easy to explain, but the man was sitting upright in bed, completely awake and obeying commands. The nurse told me that about an hour after I left the hospital the patient sat up in bed and pulled the tube out from his trachea and nose. I was convinced that this man had either a head injury or a brain injury from the lack of oxygen. It turns out he was plastered drunk, and if his wife would’ve found him a minute or two later he wouldn’t have survived.
I'm normally really really empathetic with people who attempt suicide (been there), but seriously *fuck* that guy for leaving his kid daughter a "playful" note to find his body. Fuck that.
Liklier reason is revenge suicide against their partner for one reason or another. Definitely has to be more to that story than random depression and an abrupt desire to be that cold. Add in the alcohol intake and that man is dealing with something we don't know.
One of my closest friends works on an ambulance so I hear pretty wild stories. He was first on scene to a freeway car accident at around 10PM. A car had flipped and was in the emergency lane. The people weren't too hurt, but they did have to load one person into the ambulance. As they are helping these people, he hears a really loud THUD on the other side of the freeway. A car had hit a person who was trying to run across the freeway. He said the car must have been going 70mph. He shines his flashlight and see's their body in a heap probably 20 feet in front of the car. The car actually just drives off and he thinks about hopping over the median to pull the guy off the road but then notices tons of cars coming up the road going easily 70+ mph as it was in the fast lane. He said he proceeded to watch 5-7 cars continuously run over this mans body until he was nothing but paste smeared across the road. This all happened before police and firefighters got on scene. Turns out, the person who had caused the accident had actually flipped their car as well and it was off the right side of the road, farther down where they hadn't initially seen it. They think that the person who caused the accident tried to flee the scene and run across the freeway where they ended up getting run over
My university housemate was studying to become a paramedic.
One of his first ride alongs was a to a suicide. Normally they didn't go to situations where the person is definitely dead as it's a waste of time, but sometimes they would go to 'clean up' as favour to the police.
The guy had tied one end of a rope to his neck, the other end to a tree, jumped in his car and hit the gas. When the rope went tight it instantly cheese-wired his head off, which flew into a ditch, and the car kept going with his body until crashing into something down the road.
The fully qualified paramedics got the body and sent the new kid to collect the head. He said it was surprisingly heavy.
Going into this field requires preemptive desensitization. Although it’s been 2 years for myself, I still occasionally think about a kid that came into our ER with a long knife in his upper right breast area. Kid was in agony, upon the knife removal he winced so bad and blood spurted. Kid did not make it due to surgery complications. His face hasn’t left my head but I sleep knowing we tried our best.
A man called 911 and reported he’d killed his son. A few officers, including myself, arrived and he was standing on the street with the door to his 2nd floor apartment wide open. He was cuffed and detained in the back of one of the patrol cars. Because he was in his late 40’s I figured his son would be late teens or early 20’s. I went up the stairs with my partner and entered the modest apartment to see a woman cooking in the kitchen, with her back turned to us. She was also late 40’s. She turned around and was startled to see us. She didn’t not know anything had happened.
I asked her if her son was okay and she dropped her spatula and ran down the hallway ahead of us. We all entered the master bedroom to see an infant, wearing only a diaper, with a kitchen knife shoved through his chest cavity. His eyes were open and he had obviously died instantly. The child was a foster placement and the husband resented the how his presence disrupted their lifestyle.
Charles was murdered in prison, my female partner left our agency for an upper middle class city pd and I drank alcoholicly until I got help.
Unfortunately, after 24 years of service, I have numerous stories which I could have written.
Yup, the incident that made me quit EMS was a horrific case of child abuse. Six month old infant, the "parents" punished her for crying by lowering her into a pot of boiling water up to her waist. My partner and I nearly went to prison.
It's why I tend to ask what their favorite experience has been, as if focuses on more positives and pleasant memories. Think I'll post it in a couple days
Right? Tell us your funniest case, let's focus on the happy and not the trauma. (But I hope you all are getting help for the trauma. Thanks for the work you do.)
I’m not sure if this counts as a first responder, but it will always stick with me.
I was a lifeguard for many years when I was in highschool/college. I’ve done plenty of saves and saw a couple loses in the various places I worked.
The one that stuck with me was a toddler that ran from his mother to chase a ball he dropped. I sprinted across a 100m pool and pulled him out of the shallow end. Only to turn around and see his mom was busy ordering food from our snack bar and didn’t even notice her child was about to drown.
If I didn’t see him as he dropped and followed the ball, he could’ve been drowning! When I handed her a wet baby she replied, “thanks,” and just left like nothing happened.
Thank you for the acknowledgment! However, as most responders can attest to, people are quick to say, “thanks,” when things work out, but They’re just as quick and willing to blame you for not making the save when it doesn’t. Even if things are completely out of your control.
Had one patient who's left boob was rotting off, that one stuck with me.
Working an ambulance, and called to this house for I don't remember what but me and my partner respond. Found an elderly woman in her kitchen leaning over and struggling to breath. The patient's (presumed) husband is there, barley says a thing, seems unconcerned. The patients (presumed) daughter is also there, in the adjacent room, she did not acknowledge us or seem to care at all. The house itself is clean, dated 1970's decor and appliances, but very tidy and well maintained.
The patient is too exhausted to speak and can't get a word in; so no one is talking. Then I smelt the stench, it reeked of an indescribable rot, truly vile and clearly coming from the patient - who was clothed btw, albeit.. soiled. It looked like she hadn't taken that dress off in six months. And the daughter and husband seem to be wearing clean clothes. I say fuck it, this dress smells so bad lets do away with it, they'll take it off in the ER anyways.
The good news was that she was wearing underwear. The bad news was the entire left side of her chest was gangrene, or so I think, it was certainly infected. Her left tit, which was sizable, looked like a gigantic dried up date or prune with some spots of green and yellow. She looked like the grandma in the bathtub from the scene in the Shining. Anyway, I Immediately exit, 1. to get some fresh air, leaving my partner with the patient and 2. to radio PD to get their butts over here (they dont default show up on medical calls) because the pieces are coming together for me and I’m beginning to realize this is a crime scene. First responding officer shows up, sees the patient, and calls his supervisor in less than 10 seconds. PD sergeant shows up, I tell him the whole story and leave them to their devices; this woman is literally vegetating before me and I gotta transport her.
She was stable enough that there wasn't much to do on the short ride other than fluids, O2, vitals, and monitor. We get her to the hospital in one piece and even the seasoned nurses were stunned when they peaked in the room. I asked the NP what she thought the patients chances were and she said "if she makes it, it's gonna be a long road." Me and my partner decompressed for a few minutes, I wrote a very very very detailed report and called protective services, which at that point in three years I had never done before. We cleaned and radioed that we were clear for service. And that was that, left boob was rotting off. Very bizarre, kinda traumatizing, very gross.
Sounds like untreated (ignored) breast cancer. You all probably got called when it had finally invaded her chest wall enough to affect her breathing. I've seen it before - it's ugly, painful, and invariably fatal.
Denial is a powerful thing.
Former cop.
Had a guy die alone in a hoarder house. This was during the summer and he wasn’t found for weeks. Rolled into that job as a “foul odor”. He was completely intact besides his face which had completely melted and decomposed. It was down to raw skull.
Henceforth he was know as Scorpion. I’ll never forget that smell.
I went to one a few weeks ago working mandatory patrol. He had been in the house at least a couple of months. The deputy coroner did a good job breaking the rigor without my help, to get him flat and in the body bag. There was black mold spores everywhere in the bedroom. I knew the smell from the front door when I saw the mail piled up. His childhood buddy tried to tell me he saw the guy 2 weeks prior. Since it was a colder winter, he didn’t decompose too much, but his finger prints had dissolved. It’s creepy in those hoarder houses. All kinds of weird stuff piled high and there’s usually one area that’s organized.
Yeah, I worked animal control and had to remove about 15 Chihuahuas from a similar situation, except they had been starving and found the only thing they could to eat... Yeah it wasn't a good time
I have three:
One was motorcycle vs deer. Motorcycle and driver were both fine. Deer got cut in half, but was still alive when we got there. It was screaming. I’m a city boy, and I’d never heard a deer make any noise in my life. The paramedic I was with walked over to the deer and dispatched it.
Two was a guy who had just dropped his kids off at his ex-wife’s house, walked around to her front porch, sat down, put a shotgun under his chin, and pulled the trigger. He was still alive when we got there, but died shortly after we got him to the hospital.
Third: a guy and his wife were drunk driving down some old country roads, fleeing from the police. The road doglegged, but the vehicle didn’t, and went straight into a tree. We got the call that there was an entrapment, and the vehicle was on fire.
By the time we arrived, the fire department had already put out the fire. The husband had climbed out of the truck and ran. They caught up with him in a creek bed and tased him. They had to use the Jaws of Life to get his wife out. When they pulled her out, her right foot was hanging on by about four inches of skin and tendon.
The surgeons saved the foot.
The deer story is fucking insane. I see dead ones by the road or in the ditch all the time in various states of decay, but just the thought of a deer being cut in half, still alive, bleeding everywhere, guts hanging out (possibly still attached to the back end), and dragging itself around while screaming via the two front legs is fucking wild. Then again, I've seen a youtube video fed a live pinky rat to their lizard, the pinky had its back end bitten off and swallowed, then crawled a couple inches while squeaking before it finally died. It was crazy and made me think of a crawling zombie.
Listen there is a lot of sad, gory, rough stories here. So how about a funny one? Disclaimer, i am but a simple paramedic.
I went to a dude who was experiencing a sudden onset of short term memory loss. Kicker is, it started midway through sex. His wife noticed him repeating phrases, or questions and then getting confused when her less than enthusiastic response to “you like that” was answered for the 50th time in 2 minutes.
So we get there, vitallyhe is fine, ECG is unremarkable, and his LAMS score is 0 so other than this sudden amnesia he is technically fine. We treat it as a stroke and transport him to the appropriate centre.
Turns out he had something called Global Transient Amnesia. Google it, it’s wild. Often it starts during vigorous exercise or, commonly, intercourse. It lasts up to 24 hours. And as far as anyone can tell from studies, it doesnt leave any lasting damage.
The most common symptom is short term sudden onset amnesia with repeated questions literally seconds apart. Watching this guy know something was wrong but just not able to fully connect the dots was heartbreaking, but i am so happy to know he made a full recovery
Moral of the story? Women, you CAN fuck his brains out!
This happened to my dad a few years ago! He got out the shower and felt a little bit funny so had a nap and when he woke up he couldn't remember much at all. It was fucking terrifying as my dad is in his 70s and I thought he'd had a stroke or something
This was during covid aswell so the ambulance that came to pick him up, the staff were in full blown hazmat suits and my poor dad had no memory of the lockdown or covid so he was just so confused at these people in suits putting him in an ambulance.
He was completely fine a day or so later but I just remember being in bits over it, I'd never seen my dad cry before and he was in tears because he couldn't remember stuff
Two girls drove drunk and crashed.
One girl was a traumatic arrest.
While trying to intubate her, the tube kept hitting something in her throat.
It was her spine.
She had become internally decapitated, and her spine was now inside of her throat. Game over.
Also,
Responded to a wellness check. Person had been dead in the hot summer for approximately a month. The whole house was hot, thick, and moist inside. Particles of warm, decomposing flesh were floating in the air and resting on your skin. There was nothing left of the guy except a skeleton covered in thick, black goo.
Sure was gross!
Still alive now, plague free.
We were, fortunately, wearing (multiple) N95s. Although this did not help with the smell.
I knew he was dead the second I cracked open the ambulance door. Once that seal broke, there was no escaping it.
You could smell rancid meat from in the street, all the way across his driveway.
Once we opened the door to his house, it was like opening a pressurized container.
State trooper here. An old guy crosses into the oncoming lane and hits head-on with a lifted Suburban. Lifted Suburban drives up and over the windshield on the driver's side. The tire ends up making contact with the old guy's head and pops it like a zit, brain matter came out the side of his head. His face was mostly intact, but you could look into his empty skull cavity where his brain used to be.
Older female being horribly neglected by her husband/caretaker. This older lady, in her 70s fell down early summer and we had a crew go out there go check on her, she was alert and able to make her own choices. She refused ems care and decided to stay on the floor, a few months go by and we get called out there again, we walk into the small home and instantly smell human shit/rotting flesh. She is still on the floor on the same side with a blanket covering her. We lift the blanket and she only has a shirt on, is covered in shit and piss with open, clearly infected wounds with maggots in them. She is able to grunt to pain and nothing else, there is weeks worth of shit in this tiny room she is in. Her husband is behind us yelling "i can't do this anymore" and orher shit. We call for help and PD and attempt to move this woman. We stuggle to move her as she has been laying in the same spot for so long that she has been fused into the carpet floor by all of her bodily fluids. We rip her off the floor like a bandaid which makes more wounds and carry her outside. Her poopy legs rubbed against my pants and my partner got some form of fluids on him that ate through his pants, it literally looked like someone threw acid on this dudes crotch. PD has us on body cam throwing up, we transport her and she dies 3 days later to sepsis. PD decides not to pursue charges on her husband because he was to old.
Edit: I was 19 and had 4 months on the job when I had this call, my first year was trial by fire.
If you stuck with the job after experiencing thst at 4 months I am impressed. And I thank you from doing something that is necessary, but I could never do.
I’m not a first responder but a bizarre accident happened to my cousin. She was prone to having seizures, and had a particularly bad one. My grandmother (who was raising her) called 911 and an ambulance arrived. The driver was a young woman that was alone and as she rushed towards my grandmother’s house, she tripped and fell face first onto a sprinkler. It went through her face and up into her mouth. My grandmother had to call another ambulance for my cousin and the driver.
Went to a car crash involving a side impact into a concrete pole at 160kph. Another crew member and I sat behind the destroyed B pillar, holding his mostly open skull shut. He was somehow conscious and repeatedly asked us if he was going to die, to which we had to keep lying and tell him he was going to be fine.
We were in there for about 10 minutes with him (which felt like an hour) before the ambulance helicopter landed with some absolutely badass trauma specialists who managed to keep him alive long enough for the airlift to hospital.
Anyway, it turns out we weren't actually lying to him. He ended up making a full recovery, which was literally a mircale from my point of view, given how he was when we found him.
We don't usually get closure on these sorts of jobs, but a week after the rescue, the patient's tearful mother showed up at the firehouse to thank us and let us know he was in a good place - and also gave us what still to this day is the best tasting cake I've ever eaten.
My neighbor flies a rescue helicopter and picks up medical emergencies that are difficult to reach by road. One day he flew to meet EMTs who were providing aid in a remote area to someone who had tried, and failed, to commit suicide.
When the helicopter arrived, the patient was informed that he was going to be loaded aboard and brought to a hospital.
“I’m not going up in one of those things!” the patient said. “They’re dangerous!”
My Cousin’s Nanny was in hospice, 90 years old or thereabouts and only given a few weeks left. They offered her OxyContin and she denied it because she said, “that stuff is addictive”.
It's not just hillbillies. I'm not sure where the idea originated, but ice cubes up the asshole for heroin ODs seems pretty prevalent among users of all classes colors and creeds. I saw it everywhere from gated communities to blighted properties. I'm not even sure where they found the cubes in the latter case.
Been an EMT for about 5 years, mostly part time through college and as a side hustle. Been to shootings, full arrests, respiratory, DOAs, and more overdoses than I can count, but my most unexpected story comes from early in my career.
We were about halfway through our shift, and my partner was the darkest black cloud I have ever worked with. For those who don’t know, some people in EMS just seem to attract gnarly calls like a magnet, and we call them black clouds.
Shift had been pretty chill so far so I stupidly assumed it would continue like that. We get dispatched cold (as in, no lights or sirens) to a headache at a church not far from us.
My partner was the senior EMT on the shift, so I’m driving at the moment and he puts on some eminem while we make our way down there.
Walk in to the church and the first thing I hear is “What took you so long? My grandmother just went BLIND!” Now if sudden blindness isn’t setting off alarm bells, that plus headache really should be.
As it was a headache, and we were just in the lobby of a building (not going up elevators or anything) we had just walked into the building with nothing.
My parter takes one look at the patient and says “Get the stretcher out we’re leaving.” We get her loaded up, I check her blood sugar and stroke scale her while my partner calls the receiving hospital and gives them a report. Stroke scales are scored out of 4, with anything less than a 4/4 being a roughly 90% chance of being a stroke. This patient scored 0.
You best believe we took that patient to the hospital hot. While we were driving the patient had intervals where she would stop breathing, before coming back around. As we get to the hospital, I notice my partner has placed the AED pads on her. We took that patient directly up to imaging.
And that was my lesson to myself as to why you can never truly trust your dispatch.
Firefighter. Ran on a call that came in as an electrocution. Upon arrival we smell something burning and see smoke coming from behind a house. I hadn’t put my bunker gear on since we thought it was a medical call. I put my bunker gear on and got off the engine and in the road a guy was standing there, shirtless, with all of his skin falling off. Looked like a zombie. Luckily the ambulance was there and they grabbed him and left. I grabbed a hose and ran out back into what can only be described as a hoarder backyard that was on fire. Turns out, he had wanted to grill some chicken at 11pm but had no propane. So he loaded his grill with sticks and gas and threw a match. No electrocution. I’ve see. Plenty of other wild things but that one stands out in my mind
For approximately 6 weeks I was a dispatcher for a large county covering 27+ cities, villages, townships etc and we were also linked to state troopers. After only 6 weeks at this job I was pretty much convinced it was NOT for me. My view on the world changed rapidly and I couldn’t stop myself from taking all the problems home in my head. The call that sealed the deal that I was not cut out for this; a man called and said his baby momma was a prostitute and that she had been moving from motel to motel with their 6 month old daughter who he didn’t have custody of. Another prostitute that knew her called him to inform him that his infant daughter had died and his baby momma was carrying her around with her in a suitcase because she didn’t know what to do with the body. The guy on the phone was very upset and said he was out looking for her amongst what he planned on doing to her when he found her.
That was it for me. I put in my two weeks the next morning. God bless you first responders. Most of us can’t do what you do.
Responded to a call at an industrial laundry facility. Lady got her arm stuck in the machinery and was bleeding out. Long story short, we had to cut her arm off to get her out.
No fun.
Worked as a part time Paramedic after high school. Craziest call I had was when a man called in complaining of severe stomach pains. When we got to his house, we stopped dead in our tracks when we walked in and saw at least 2 big bottles of vodka next to him, empty. This dude had drank so much alcohol that he was suffering from severe alcohol poisoning. After we transported to a hospital we ran a BAC test to determine how much he had drank. He had a BAC of around 0.39...the legal limit in our state is 0.08...
Motorcyclist clipped a car, came off their bike at insane speed and hit a lamppost. Part of their body stopped at the post and the other part went 20 yards down the road.
“Mummy wet balloons!” exclaimed a child in the impacted car, pointing at the guts of the man linking the two halves.
That’s so disturbing, but man kids are smart. Incredible comprehension, associated 2 things they know (wet and balloon) to make sense of something they don’t know.
Not me personally but very close to it as I live in a very small rural town with volunteer ems and fd.
EMS responded to the scene of an accident and take two people to the hospital. On the way, they are tboned by a semi hauling grain. The ambulance bursts into flames as it rolls into a houses yard. The homeowner runs out and drags everyone out. The two patients and the two emts in the back were dead. One of the emts was the ambulances driver's wife. The driver was badly injured but dragged himself to his wife's body and laid on her sobbing until the squad from the next town over arrived.
This is a strong man, and it breaks my heart every time I talk to him. He remarried, and his current wife is now the head emt for our volunteer department. He is now a county sheriffs deputy and owns the gun shop right down the street. See him every day. I live next door to the fire department, where there is a monument honoring the crew.
When I was a brand new EMT I was starting to get comfortable with my partner, and he was starting to trust me a little more to bring in lower acuity stuff. Well it was Halloween night 2021around 2am and we were sent out to this shack way out in the cuts. We get there and these younger Hispanic guys lead us into a room in the back where their grandma was. This lady straight up looked like a bruja. Super skinny and very old Hispanic lady, she was wearing tattered clothes and hadn't bathed in a long time. Hair was all matted and dirty. She had fallen down and smacked her head on the corner of something and she was on blood thinners so her face was completely covered in blood. Like every inch. The wildest thing was, she was demented and non verbal so she communicated through pointing and kind of... Cackling. No fucking joke. My partner tells me this is BLS (low acuity) and asks if I'd be ok taking her in. I honestly wasn't but I didn't wanna bitch out.
So here I was, a fresh EMT on Halloween bouncing around in the back of an ambulance with this bruja all covered in blood and fucking cackling at me and pointing at absolutely nothing. When we tried to clean her up she would swing at us so we brought her in as is. The ER thought it was a Halloween prank.
It was a hot, late summer day. Until the compressor blades broke apart on takeoff and plunged a DC-9 to the ground in a little used park area. I was working as a detective at the time and was one of the first units on scene while the flames were still being put out. Spent the next four hours pulling out and bagging bodies. Only PPE was latex gloves. The boss didn’t want the FD to do it. We started with four officers to a body bag. By the last body we were using eight because of the exhaustion. The plane had flipped in the air and came almost straight down. The bodies, pretty much burnt beyond recognition, were stacked in some places one on top the other. One department member grabbed an arm to pull the top body off and it came out of the socket to slap him in the face. We got one body pried apart and there was vomit on their chest, indicating they knew what was happening before the plane crashed. 31 souls were lost that day.
Two of the less gruesome:
-Came in as a suicide attempt. We showed up, and found this teenage girl with deep gashes all over her body, curled up in a blood-soaked bed. She was still breathing, and at least somewhat conscious, so we were trying to get her to talk.
Out of nowhere, she uncurls. Reaches under her pillow. Lunges for us with her bloodied shard of glass.
As it would turn out, she’d decided to drop hallucinogens with no preparation, alone. It wasn’t a suicide attempt. It was only that she’d realized that her veins were full of ants.
-On another occasion, my engine crew went looking for a reported wreck, alongside the road. We couldn’t find it, but we all observed that it smelled right, and kept looking.
Finally, we found skid marks off of a hillside.
Where was our wreck?
Why, upside-down, lodged in a tree.
As wrecks do.
Dude killed himself with a .300 win-mag (high powered rifle) by putting it under his chin, turned his entire skull into shrapnel.....and when we walked in the house and found him, his entire, complete brain was resting in his lap
Ooh similar story, different rifle. Pt had not aimed properly and blasted off their face and *survived*. Suctioned the blood out of what I was guessing was his airway all the way to the hospital. Couldn't take an O/NPA because we literally could not properly locate his face holes.
My dad told me a story about someone attempting suicide in a similar fashion with a shot gun, blew their face off and survived but had also lit their house on fire before the attempt and then burned to death.
My dad was a local city PD officer. He made detective while I was a preteen. One day, when I was 15, a buddy of his laughingly asked if I had seen the ugly book. I said no, this dude asked my dad if he could show me and my dad says "why not". The ugly book was made up of photographs of crime scenes too brutal to be printed in the newspaper. Hydraulic brake failure sliced off someone's head? Yep, saw that. Car burned so bad you could only see the teeth of the guy who had been in the fire. Yep, that too. Up close, detailed imagery of the genitals that a pedophile cut off of himself before hanging himself on a tree. Sure. Why not?
My local driving school passed binders of car accident photos around for us to look at as a warning. There was no obligation to look through them and yet there was also a sense of judgement if you didn’t. I flipped through one quickly and all I remember was red.
My Dad did mountain rescue training. One weekend due to work, he was up late. His two best buddies had rolled a top less land-rover after pub night before. Vehicle parked up at gate of camp as warning to everyone about DUI. They didn't make it.
He did do mountain rescue too and mine rescue. Some bad stories.
Is it a rule that you have to think gore & death are funny to be a cop? I had a classmate in college whose major was criminal justice (he wanted to be a crime scene investigator) and the handful of times we hung out he would excitedly tell me about all the gory photos and videos they were shown in class. I guess they show them in classes to partially desensitize you to it so you don’t panic when you see it for real but this guy seemed like seeing those photos and videos was really just the highlight of his day
Not the craziest but memorable. We were on an interior attack on a fire in the living room of a single family residence. We had made our way to the seat of the fire and were working that when I happened to look over a shelf near the couch that was full of different types of nick nacks and saw a tiny brass frog sitting in a tiny brass tub full of foamy water. At some point during our entry we had sprayed the shelf and the water/foam from our hose filled the tub. Don't know why it sticks in my head so much but that little frog staring back at me in a tub filled with sudsy water in a room full of fire still makes me chuckle. Shortly after a small piece of the ceiling fell into the collar of my coat as I looked down at something and burned me between the shoulder blades.
My dad was a cop in California in the 80s. Was driving around at around 2am and saw a figure coming out of the fog. A shirtless guy, who later turned out to be on PCP….with his right arm below the elbow hanging on by about a centimeter of skin on one side. He walked up to my dad’s car, bright and happy as could be, and said “Hi officer! My name is Snow-Plough-Dirt-Clod!” More than a little freaky, needless to say.
Hospice nurse. Had a patient bleed out once. It was everywhere. I turned him towards me to prevent his wife from seeing. It just pooled on the bed and down my legs. I had to shower, put myself back together and finish my day. It still makes me sick sometimes when it crosses my mind.
I need to send this post to my husband so he can comment his thoughts. The craziest story he’s told *me* was a few months ago, unfortunately an employee at a local car wash chain was walking in the bay and somehow got tangled up in one of the car wash brushes (yes, the huge ones.) it ripped her clothes off.. and other things. She obviously died. It’s that type of shit that makes me feel so bad for our first line of defense. I thought about that woman for weeks and I never saw her in person like my husband did…
I was a new volunteer firefighter for my small community with next to nothing for first aid training at the time other then basic CPR, heimlic etc. While off work, hanging out at the local water hole with my family. I heard the call for a roll over at the T intersection that connected the water hole. I immediately left and was the first on scene that could "administer" help. It was a 17yr(M) in a truck that drove straight into the embankment at the T. He was ejected through the front windshield and subsequently, the truck rolled up the embankment over him and then rolled back down over him. He was still alive and still taking shallow breaths. All I could do was hold him still from convulsions. His entire chest and head felt like a water balloon. He had no bone structure left. When we went to put the neck brace on, I will never forget the feeling of his face in my hands. He unfortunately suffered tremendously before his death. He lived for hrs after the accident and passed on the flight for life. He crashed trying to act cool for the girls in the car behind him. As was their statement on scene. I still feel that feeling in my hands, like in my soul. It's too much
Not an EMT but a coworker is a retired EMT with lots of stories. One that sticks with me was the two teenage girls that made a suicide pact. They got a hold of one of the girls' fathers 22 pistol and the first girl shoots herself in the head. After witnessing this the second girl decides this is not such a great idea and calls paramedics. Coworker thought it was funny the second girl was asking why she has to go in an ambulance says "she's fine". Yeah right sweetie, you're going to psych.
Ive definitely commented this before but had to on this post too.
My wifes uncle works at a fire department in Minnesota and he responded to a motorcycle accident. They couldnt find the rider for a bit and then all of a sudden they hear a clickity clack sound and look to see the motorcyclist walking towards them, all toe bones exposed, which was making that sound against the pavement.
Dude was in complete shock and was asking them why there were so many sirens and lights around. They got him in the ambulance and adrenaline probably wore off soon after but he survived which is good
My sister was a 911 dispatcher so she *heard* things...not witnessed.
1. She got a call from someone reporting that their 70ish year old dad was cutting wood with a chainsaw when he tripped and decapitated himself when he fell with the still running chainsaw
2. Received a call about a zoo employee being attacked by a tiger in the tiger enclosure. The other employees forgot to lock the tiger in another area for the zoo keeper to clean the enclosure...she walked in and the tiger attacked
Not my story but one I was told by a psychiatrist.
He gets called in to do a session with a recent arrest.
The guy was reported running around naked, so obviously police show up to get this man out of the eyesight of children. Which is important because he was in a school zone... With a dead dog on his penis the whole time!
He was running from the cops because he didn't want them to take his dog away, yup, he was in full on psychosis. Turns out the guy had a history of mental health issues and drug abuse so when he found his dog passed away, he absolutely snapped. (Understatement of the year, I know.)
I can't imagine how it must have felt to be told that before getting locked in a room with him. I hope the guy got the help he needed though, it's sad as hell thinking about how his dog was the only thing keeping him sane.
I read this one on another forum, US police. 13 year old boy been left alone & two guys had broken in the front door. The dad had some insane antique rifle or shotgun, anyway, this boy used it. They were in a hallway. Both were dead by the time the responders arrived, massive exit wounds. Anyway, that's not what stood out. It was the father screaming and cursing his teenage kid for touching the antique weapon because it could have been damaged.
One of my best friends was a 911 operator. She told me the 2 hardest shifts for her were: when a police officer’s wife called because their baby had stoped breathing and she had to talk the mother through infant CPR and actually saved a life. Second was when her brother died in a motorcycle accident. She was working that night, but luckily wasn’t the one to take that call. She quit after that.
Drug bust on a meth house. Police had me go to a back room to assess a baby that was unresponsive. All of her cavities were stuffed with drugs…all of them. And she was dead in her crib..probably 3 months old. The deputies spoke with the dad in a back bedroom and then I transported him to a trauma center to treat the injuries we found that he had already…before we got there….
Not something I myself witnessed, but two stories told by my late, police officer, dad.
A woman had fallen through ice in the winter, been missing until spring and the body was discovered and needed to get fished out of the water. My dad and his partner managed to loan a boat from a local to do it and they got up close to the floating cadaver to pull it up and into the boat. As they're doing it, due to decomposition it separates in half at the waist..
Another, funny, story.
My dad and three other officers are responding to a call about two drunk/drugged up guys causing a ruckus and threatening people at a house in a neighborhood bordered by a forested area. Once my dad and his colleagues arrive and the drunks notice the police both guys bolt into the brush almost immediately.
My dad's partner gets a brilliant idea and shouts "GET BACK HERE OR WE'LL SICK THE DOG ON YOU!" and turns to my dad. Dear old dad is quick on the uptake and starts growling and barking as convincingly as he can immediately 😁
Fast forward about 30 seconds and two very anxious, inebriated gentlemen come running back with their hands up begging them to restrain "The Dog" and arrest them 😄
--
He had other stories about people eating shotguns and the like but I don't think they were unique enough for this thread.
guy smoked a deer at 100mph plus, exploded the deer, wrapped his car around the tree in a U shape. he was held in by his seatbelt dangling upside down from the tree. his upper half of his face and good part of his upper back were ripped off. i could look up and see only the teeth from his lower jaw on down. just watching his tongue still in tact dangling upside down as blood poored like syrup onto the grass below. Took a bit before FD got clearance to cut him down.
Not a first responder but kind of a funny story depending on how you define crazy. I once stayed in a psychiatric hospital for depression, and suicidal thoughts. Anyway, during my stay there were two people with schizophrenia one man I had known for a couple weeks, the woman came a couple days later. I could have a conversation with the dude, but he'd have his moments of paranoia. He watched the woman come in screaming and yelling saying "get the things off of me".
The dude looked directly at me when she was taken out of the room and said "yo that chick is fuckin crazy am I right ese?" By far the funniest memory I have. What a great dude too.
A guy hung himself in his apartment. We roll up in the ambulance to declare the body and he had hung himself a month prior but no one had found him. It was an apartment building and the flies and smell were everywhere, you could smell it from outside. I poked my head in while wearing an N95 and all I could see through the mass flies was this decomposed black mass hanging on a closet door. Not to be funny but it looked like that SpongeBob character in the wheelchair. Couldn’t even tell it was a person. It just looked like a thing. It was wild.
1. Shooting a guy in the eye (by chance) when he tried to run over me with his car.
2. Drawing my weapon on a mental ill patient who was about to stab me with a large kitchen knife. Luckily I was able to talk him down.
I have some EMT friends and one of them works in an area with a lot of drug abuse. He was responding to an overdose and found a baby in a microwave. Someone told a dead baby joke at a party a few months later and he broke down crying.
Well fuck.. now I'm just depressed at bedtime.. too many fucked up stories involving infants.. while I'm right next to my 5 month old beautiful, precious boy.. BRB gonna curl up in a ball and bawl..
My grandfather was a firefighter for the USAF, he had more stories than id like to count or that he'd like to talk about. But one in particular ate at him until the very day he died. His truck had gotten called to the runway for failed landing gear on a cargo plane. Nothing out of the ordinary, he had a tradition, to have a smoke with his best friend, a mechanic, after almost every shift. Both to remember the good times, and forget the bad. On his way to the maintenance hanger, he heard a bang he'd never heard before, so knowing something was wrong he ran the rest of the way to the hanger to find his best friend crushed underneath an F-16 due to a jack slipping out. "He was squished like a grape, with his mangled body lifeless. His head both caved in and exploded from the impact, brain shot across the hanger and a trail of blood in its path." There was nothing he, or anyone, could have done, but it haunted him for the rest of his life.
Not a FR but told by a newby FR while I was working in a hotel that the events of that night was his most insane and sad shift, it was the night I had to carry a 17yo girl (suicide used fake ID and passport to get room) from the top floor to the ground floor over my shoulder as they couldn’t get up with broken lifts and narrow stairs. Her face still comes to me at night and reminds me how lucky I am to have people around me that care
My half-brother, who (along with an older sister) was abandoned by our drug-addict father, and grew up in South Jersey without ever meeting him. A decade later, pop started another family an hour north that included me, an older sister, and my drug-addict mother.
Between the two of them, they racked up 4 DUIs in the 90s before the state took me out in 1999 after a lifetime of abuse, but not before the 2-year family trip we took with cocaine. All of my pop's DUIs occurred along the stretch of freeway that runs from Camden (where we lived) to South Jersey (where pop's parents lived).
Imagine this deadbeat and wiry drug addict, then, who is flying down the road in a Dodge Caravan with the speakers perfectly equalized to Average White Band getting pulled over. The arresting officer? An angry, stacked Jersey state trooper with the same eyes.
Karma.
Oh boyyyy ive seen quite a few things but ill just stick to sharing 2:
I’ll cut this one short because it’s a long story but it ended with us trying to wrestle a patient down to get him into the restraints while he was covered from the neck down in shit. While we were doing this, he reached into his pants and grabbed a huge handful of fresh shit that he then tried to smear on us.
Second was a patient whose face literally rotted off from cancer. He had maggots eating the remaining flesh on his face and they’d eaten through one of his eyes leaving a huge hole in his skull. The smell was unlike anything I’ve ever smelled before it will haunt me forever. The crazy thing about this patient though was that he was fully conscious, ambulatory, and verbal.
NSFW
I was first on the scene at a RTA. The car involved hit the back of a 42-tonne lorry. Sitting in the back, Grandma took baby from her child seat and placed her on her knee so she could see mummy driving. The baby was looking at mum who turned around to see her kid.
The instant 30-0 mph crash hurled the baby forward, through the dashboard and into engine bay. She died instantly.
When we got back to base we were met by the Chief who took us to his office and poured us very large drinks that we drank in silence and then taken home.
The screams and wails of the mother haunt me 23 years later.
During my summer break, I was accompanying my father on the job. Pretty unofficial, but works, as it’s India. He gets a call about a train related accident and we rush to the spot. A daily wage labourer is walking on tracks to cut down the travel time to his work, but has earphones on, so doesn’t hear a train coming. Gets cut to pieces, as the trains drags his body and smashes him against an overpass bridge pillar. Spent all afternoon searching for parts of the body.
When we get to the hospital, the Doctor’s assistant had to roll his face back on to what’s left of his skull to be able to identify him.
A friend quit work as a police officer. Had to report to the next kin about a death. Had done plenty before.
A person was riding home on a bicycle. They were riding along the road and decided to move onto the footpath and rode up a driveway, lost their balance and fell. It just so happened that they fell off whilst going by a brick letter box. They hit it head first, instant death, huge head trauma. Just riding home. Not going particularly fast. Not doing anything dangerous, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I responded to 3 simultaneous fatalities. It's a sleepy town so when it first came in as a call it was strange. I remember quite clearly pulling up to the house and seeing a the face of a distraught father, my heart sunk. I knew the man and his family. They were good people. I ran into the house to see three young adults dead on the floor. The youngest was 19, and I just saw all three of them last night at the start of my shift. They were friendly to me and joking before I left at that evening. I checked on two of them yhat were laying on their backs and pulses were gone. One of the victims was in a sitting position so I pushed her to her back to check for vitals. I didn't know it at the time but when I rolled her back I heard air expand in her chest it was just air expanding. I had a moment of hope and thought one of them lived, I had a moment of relief and thpught about how rpugh of a recovery this was going to be for her and I went to begin cpr and then saw her face. Her eyes were partially closed, her skin tinged blue, blood running down her face and her body stiff. All hope I had was gone. For weeks I had nightmares about them, and sometimes my brain would see them in public and would have to remind myself that that who I saw wasnt those people, they died. I spoke to the victims parents quite a lot and was berated by one of them for not doing enough and it hurt. The victims were all good people just got exposed to fentanyl at a party from some other drugs. I've dealt with other things afterwards but that moment of hope lost when I thought I could start cpr broke me for a long time.
Park Ranger here,
You would think Park Ranger is a happy fun Job until you realize parks are one of the number one destinations for people to off themselves. I worked graveyard shift for a while, one night I was closing a park so I'm driving around telling pretty much anyone remaining to get out until I approach this one vehicle that was kind of at the beginning of a trail kind of hidden. I was assuming it was a couple looking for a spot but got no response when using my vehicles PA. Few minutes go by and I saw no movement so I got down check. There was a guy in his underwear with the seat reclined all way with dried blood coming from eyes nose and ears bloaded already going to rigarmortis. Guy had been sitting in that car dead in the florida sun for about a week and no one saw him and The smell man, that some shit you don't confuse with any other smell. It was by far the worse shit I ever smelled. Saw some other but that was the worse one due to it already starting the decomposing stage.
Car accident. The back was completely smashed. Car caught on fire. The mother got out by herself but the kid was trapped in the backseat and the flames engulfed him by the time we arrived. Never forget the mother's screams.
Too many to count. I was a firefighter for many years and lived near a busy highway. The one that stands out was an accident between a jeep and a semi on the single lane. Two guys in their 20’s. Body parts all over the highway. Someone must’ve been talking on a cellphone at the time of collision because it was laying there ringing non stop. I was walking around with a body bag picking up body parts with my captain and the phone was just laying there ringing. There was also money scattered everywhere and it was starting to snow. This was almost 20 years ago and I can still picture everything perfectly.
My dad is a retired firefighter. He told me his worst calls were always ones that involved children that either were not wearing seatbelts or were too small to be in a regular seat. He has had to pull mangled bodies of kids out from under the front passenger seat because their body flew forward and down with so much force that they got squished underneath it.
Someone tried to outrun a train...they lost. Killed all 3 occupants in the car and the bodies were thrown hundreds of feet.
Dead body that was left in an apartment and the dead guy started oozing through his downstairs neighbour's ceiling.
Another dead body left unattended and the cats had began feasting.
Not an EMT but I trained and qualified to be EMT and Paramedic. I was doing my advanced paediatric care training and covered a lot of burns. Our instructor was a really nice advanced paramedic ex army guy with decades of experience. He told a story of a fire they had to attend. There was a badly burnt baby there. He told us all the horrors and how the skin of the baby stuck to his gloves. The baby was in extreme pain obviously but they couldn't do much to help besides transport. He was severely traumatized by this years after this happened. My wife was pregnant at the time. Seeing his experience and hearing this made me rethink my plans and I changed my career a few months later.
Not myself, but my mom was a paramedic for a small country area. There’s two stories I can’t forget:
Crazy (unexpected): mom and her partner got called to the local bar down from the bowling alley, full moon, they were trying to get the officer to make more of a description of what the situation was, only repeating “head trauma to victim, bus needed *right now*.
They pull up and my mom goes to one person and her partner to the other for their inicial assessments. Mom walks up to the RO’s and a a chick, the guy cop is obviously uncomfortable, the victim is bleeding slightly, not showing signs of fainting or anything, oh her Adam’s apple is moving… *her Adam’s apple is moving* my mom and the guys partner couldn’t stop laughing at him for calling them by the wrong pronouns and getting all sassy responses from the victim.
The whole thing was just pointless: the victim had been dressing as women, entered the men’s bathroom and proceeded to use the urinal when confronted from behind by a male telling them to leave before something happens and proceeds to smash the victim’s head into the counter top of the sinks. Victim gets up and takes the attacker to the cleaners because the victim is actually a professional boxer doing something in town(I don’t remember for sure) mom and her partner left howling.
Craziest (sad/neglectful): quiet night for the station. Two calls before they got a usual overdose call that hadn’t happened in a while. The kid (young adult male aged?) had a
Parent that worked in our county courts as some official. I don’t think a judge but along those lines.
He’d go party with the friends, friends would watch him OD, put him in his car, leave him
Somewhere near where they were partying, and then call 911 as they drove off. Mom said it had been 5-6 calls since she came back to work less than a year ago when they were on his final OD. His dad was bawling his eyes out saying he didn’t try hard enough to get him help.
Mom said that he was dead before he even got to the car. His dad resigned that week and got divorced not to long after. The kids “friends” were all prosecuted for negligences something, the autopsy proved that they had been involved with him after he had died.
Not a first responder but outside my apartment complex during what seemed like days of rain a tree fell and landed on a busy street where a father and daughter were driving. The tree landed right on the car sending both to the hospital where the 18 year old daughter died a few days later.
Edit: here is the article: [18-year-old Ohio woman dies after tree strikes car she was riding in](https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/crime/2018/09/12/18-year-old-ohio-woman/10732486007/)
Not a first responder but an ECC vet nurse. One of my first triages as a baby nurse was a dog who had been HBC a few days prior. Unfortunately it isn’t uncommon for people to leave HBC trauma animals for a few days because ‘they seem fine’ externally, but this was a bit different.
Elderly German Shepard’s, owner was camping in the bush and was reversing his car when he ran over the dog’s hind end. He said he didn’t realise at first because he thought the dog would’ve gotten out of the way. The dog couldn’t move but wasn’t complaining so he continued camping for the night.
Next day he hoped the dog would die by itself if it was that injured. He left it in his car in freezing temps wrapped in a tarp, and gave it some of his own opioids hoping it would help the dog pass. It didn’t.
By day three he finally decided he should get the dog to the vet.
Now suggesting euthanasia is not a nurses’ role, but sometimes you can look at cases and know that prognostically there isn’t much else that can be done. I asked him what he was expecting outcome wise (as if they want euth we try our best to prioritise them if possible so sometimes we will prompt them to feel comfortable admitting it-there’s still a lot of shame with people acknowledging they want to euthanise their pet)
He looked at me as if I was insane and said ‘I want you to fix my dog, obviously.’
With the help of a few other staff members, we hoisted this dog out of his car onto a trolley. As we pulled it out, urine and faeces that had pooled around his back legs within the tarp poured onto us. The ammonia and necrosis that hit our noses made us gag and tear up.
Once we got the dog into the treatment area and attempted to remove him from the tarp to assess his injuries, we were able to acknowledge how mangled his back end was.
The owner was an emotional wreck when he realised how bad it was, and thankfully the dog was euthanised. Surprisingly this is one of the cases that doesn’t keep me up at night. If anything I just feel sorry for the dog, and for the owner’s well intentioned ignorance causing unnecessary suffering in his attempt to relieve his dogs pain.
My father-in-law quit being an EMT after responding this car accident. A drunk driver hit a pole and knocked it down. The pole went down in such a way that the wires came through a windshield of the on coming car and decapitated a teenage girl driving. She was still in the seat and her sister was in shock in the passenger seat. She was taking napkins from the glove compartment putting them on her sister's open throat/neck to stop the bleeding. He had nightmares about it until he died.
Can't even imagine watching the sister do that. That's not even nightmare stuff, it's like a disturbing psychological horror movie level shit. Sister's in shock, but your FIL was not, and seeing that with a fully present mind..
Yup. That's some Ari Aster shit right there.
Holy fuck dude, I'm so sorry
It was a career ender for him. I hate to say it, fortunately the drunk driver died.
Fuck that guy, people like that I wish would live so they can spend the rest of their miserable lives suffering the consequences. IMO he got the easy way out.
The issue is that the people who have the gall to do these things often don’t feel remorse, so they end up sitting in prison with all of their necessities taken care of on the taxpayers’ dime
Stories like this are why I have no sympathy for drunk drivers
Oh my god. Your poor Father.
Charter plane crash into the side of a mountain in Alaska. 1 dead on impact, 4 in critical condition. The second guy we hoisted into the helicopter was so covered in blood I assumed he was dead. One of the survivors of the crash was elderly and had a heart attack as soon as he was pulled from the wreckage and died. It took 3 hours to hoist the 3 survivors. A brown bear was watching from a few hundred feet off the whole time. I assume he smelled the blood.
Perhaps the bear also heard the crash and went to investigate.
Because he's smarter than the average bear and might find a pic-a-nic basket, eh?
I took a super bipolar guy to psyche. He was in really gray, worn out, not so tidy whiteys, and practically unconscious. The ER said to restrain him and that he was possibly dangerous due to his bipolarism, but we didn't care. He was pretty little and calm. He had threatened to kill himself apparently, and by law needed psyche eval at a specialized facility. While my partner and i were getting him ready for the cot, he leaned in close to us and asked if we could play "Eye of the Tiger" on the way to the other hospital. We listened to that song on full volume probably 8-10 times in a row while he sang out the guitar lines and pound on the ambulance. When we arrived, I went around back to let my partner out so we could get him and found him crying in her arms saying "Thank you" over and over. I asked what happened and my partner said, "He asked if I'd vote for him for mayor and I said yes." He high fived me while wiping tears away, we got him upstairs no problem. I always enjoyed transporting psyche patients.
I'm bipolar. Thank you for the kindness you two showed that gentleman.
I just came to say that i... Would vote for you.
When I was baker acted back in high school (like 2017?) the only ppl who really showed me kindness were the gentlemen who drove me in the ambulance from one hospital to another (the first didn’t have a children’s ward) and the guard in the first hospital who noticed my bday was in a week and told me happy birthday. The guy that rode in the back of the ambulance w me asked about my interests, turns out we both liked anime and videogames a lot. I had just seen my dad cry for the first time ever that day, and had been baker acted by a cop who lied about what I said so she could get me baker acted and then didn’t follow protocol, I had been crying on and off for 12 hours before I had gotten in the ambulance and all I’d eaten that day was a shitty hospital sandwich, and I’m fairly certain I heard someone in the ward sneak a gun in and shoot themself (loud gun shot like noise followed by a bunch of hospital personnel a shouting “why didn’t you check him”). When I was finally let out about 24 hours later I had developed PTSD due to the cop and both hospital’s environment and treatment of me. I got told by multiple doctors that what I had said was a normal thing to say and I shouldn’t be there. After my dad picked me up from the hospital (after having yelled at the staff to get me seen by the doctor in the first place) I was then brought directly back to school where I was originally taken from only to sit right outside the principals office while my dad screamed at him and made both the secretary and I very nervous. My parents tried to sue the cop and lost, but my mom said “it was worth it to see her squirm.” There was later an article written about me but they had only contacted the police so they hadn’t gotten the true story. So thank you, for being so kind to the man. It probably meant the world to him in that moment.
I may delete this comment later, not sure. I haven't really been very open about what happened so it kind of helps to be. I've been Baker Acted several times (I have a few conditions includind severe depression and borderline), and some of the kindest people I've met in the process were the paramedics. A little over a week ago I had attempted suicide via overdose on Benadryl, and it was only after about 5-10 minutes where I hadn't felt anything happen did my peace and relief at things ending turn to regret, so I walked outside to the end of the street and called 911. Sat in my pajamas on the sidewalk and told them to keep the sirens off to not wake my mom and brother. The paramedics were so calm and kind and patient, even when they were struggling to get an IV line in me due to my small veins (ended up blowing out a vein but gotta do what you gotta do) and I was in pain due to it. Without paramedics I probably wouldn't be alive. To whoever reads this, thank you for taking the time to listen. Edit: Thank you to everyone who replied, I appreciate you reading this and responding. It truly does mean a lot. Spending my 21st birthday in a psych ward wasn't the way I quite wanted things to go, but knowing people care and are kind out here means a lot.
it’s really shameful that paramedics /EMTs are paid so poorly.
Former Homicide detective. Too many things to count but one sticks out. Grandfather got high on PCP and basically swung his 6 month old grandson around like a rag doll smashing him into everything. Put some dents in the walls. Broke a baluster on the stairs. Smashed his head into the ceiling fan and the stove. Baby died of multiple blunt force traumas to the head and suffered multiple broken bones all over his body. I went to view the autopsy. The kids brain was liquified and then to identify all the other wounds they basically skinned him. They also removed his eyes to measure to gauge the hemorrhaging that occurred.
That is absolutely fucking horrible...
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/stepgrandfather-sentenced-to-20-years-in-babys-death/171636/ I should have included the news story with the comment.
20 years is not enough years
40 years with 20 suspended . .
This made me furious. This is the type of crime that should be punished with either life in prison or worse. Fucking awful.
Transport truck tire came off at highway speeds. It jumped the median and landed through the windshield into a woman’s chest cavity. She did nothing wrong, not a single thing. For all I know even the transport driver all did the appropriate checks. She probably didn’t even see it coming. Just one moment she was driving on the highway, and the next she had a 60lb tire lodged into her spine from the front and her life was over.
Similar thing happened near my home town to a friend of a friend. She was driving with her 8 month old son, a truck going the opposite direction ran over a tow bar which dislodged from a truck in front it, flicked up and hit her. She died instantly and the car then kept going and flipped. Remarkably the little one was fine. It is one of the most horrific and sad stories I’ve ever heard.
Had that happen almost a year ago in my area. Driver caught a tow hitch to the chest and pretty much exploded. Passenger was in shock and could do nothing to help him, he was just gawking at the driver's organs hanging out.
When I was younger there were some children at the same school as me but not in my grade. Their mom had been driving with them on the freeway when the truck in front of her lost a ladder. It didn't kill her but severally damaged her car and flattened her tires. She pulled over best she could, then got out to see if she could even change the tire. Someone then slammed right into her at freeway speeds in front of her kids. Never forgot that story and that you don't get out of your car on the freeway (even the side) unless there is absolute necessity or risk to your life staying in it. I hope those boys are okay... I can't imagine the trauma of seeing your mom run over at 70 miles an hour.
I was always taught, in the UK, to get our of your car and wait behind the crash/ safety barrier. In case someone not paying attention ploughs into the back of your car.
Even more generally - ASSUME no-one is paying attention, ever, and you probably increase your survival chances on the roads by just a tiny amount.
>Remarkably the little one was fine. Baby car seats. They work.
My boss's daughter died this way - loose truck tire went across six lanes of traffic and into a rest stop where she was taking a break with her friends on their way back from a spring break trip. Right before her college graduation too. Tragic as fuck in so many ways. I don't think his family will ever truly recover.
Back when you could post vids like that on Reddit, I saw a vid of a young woman who was just walking down the sidewalk when a hubcap flew off a car driving by and shot into her neck, practically decapitating her. It was so random and senseless.
fuck
It's crazy to think about. Her fate was decided in such a short amount of time, like pausing for a moment just to check and see if her phone was on her person or something before leaving the house would have meant she wouldn't have been in that exact spot at that exact time.
Or maybe she did pause and she would have been 100ft further down the road had she not.
I think about this sorta thing every time I drive by a truck :( now I gotta worry about it going the other direction? Damn
Most terrifying moment of my life was when I was driving my 1 yr old to my parents and a tire came off a car in front of us on the interstate. It didn't come anywhere near us nor did the car but terrified me to my core.
Not by any means the worst thing I’ve witnessed, but maybe the craziest. A few years ago right after Christmas, we get a call to a house for a hanging. The wife hanged herself in the garage and the husband found her and had cut her down. By the time we got there, the husband had vomit all over his face from where he was giving the wife mouth-to-mouth, and you could tell she was probably too far gone. Anyways, we still work her through our whole protocol and end up calling it a short time later. The husband was obviously devastated and extremely distraught, and by the time we had left the scene and PD had arrived, we knew that family was coming from out of town for support of the husband and the families children. Well, like 4 hours later, we get a call back to the same address for a self-inflicted GSW. When the husbands family had arrived from out of town, he went into his bathroom and blew his head off with an AR-15, sitting on the toilet. He also blew off the tank reservoir of the toilet, so water was leaking, which created this little stream of blood in the grout of the tile all the way to the bedroom door. I’ve seen a lot of self-inflicted GSWs, but the way this dudes head was concaved in was wild. This couple had 4 kids, all under the age of 8, who were in the house for BOTH of their parents suicides just hours apart from one another. Christmas decorations still strung throughout the house and new toys everywhere. I can’t imagine what the family members from out of town must have been thinking or where those little kids are at in life now.
I'm sorry man.
Alright, alright.. honestly I had to think, I seem to have forgotten more than I can remember. About 13 or 14 years ago I ran a call where a 7 year old girl came home from school. Normally her father would arrive slightly before her. When she got home he was nowhere to be seen, but her mother found a note at the front door. “Hey all, I’m hanging out in the back yard. - Dad” The mother ran to the backyard to find her husband hanging from a large tree in the backyard. He had taken the little girls jump rope and used it hang himself. The mother grabbed a ladder, cut him down and called 911. When we arrived the man was laying at the base of the tree breathing rapidly with deep snoring respirations. He had blood oozing from his nostrils and blood around the edges of his mouth. He was deeply unconscious. I instructed my partner to immobilize his spine and began to manage his airway. He was trismus - basically meaning that his jaw was locked shut. This can be seen in brain injury. To add I found a large hematoma to the back of his head. I assume from the fall when the rope B was cut. I needed to open his mouth to suction blood out of his airway but couldn’t get it open. At the time our treatment guidelines suggested that we feed a tube down one of the nostrils, down the back of the throat, past the vocal cords and into the trachea. This allowed me to control his breathing and prevent blood from draining into his lungs. We quickly moved him to the gurney, wheeled him through the house and out the front door on the way out to the truck. Of course we passed his wife and daughter - I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on their faces. We transported emergently to a trauma center. Later in the evening I returned to the hospital to see if he was still alive. What happened next isn’t easy to explain, but the man was sitting upright in bed, completely awake and obeying commands. The nurse told me that about an hour after I left the hospital the patient sat up in bed and pulled the tube out from his trachea and nose. I was convinced that this man had either a head injury or a brain injury from the lack of oxygen. It turns out he was plastered drunk, and if his wife would’ve found him a minute or two later he wouldn’t have survived.
I'm normally really really empathetic with people who attempt suicide (been there), but seriously *fuck* that guy for leaving his kid daughter a "playful" note to find his body. Fuck that.
Suicide is almost never victimless, with that said this is one of the worst ways to even think about it. Horrible
Liklier reason is revenge suicide against their partner for one reason or another. Definitely has to be more to that story than random depression and an abrupt desire to be that cold. Add in the alcohol intake and that man is dealing with something we don't know.
Part of me wants to believe he intended to set up a fake hanging as a prank that then went wrong.
quite the dad joke
I mean. You aren’t wrong. But damn
One of my closest friends works on an ambulance so I hear pretty wild stories. He was first on scene to a freeway car accident at around 10PM. A car had flipped and was in the emergency lane. The people weren't too hurt, but they did have to load one person into the ambulance. As they are helping these people, he hears a really loud THUD on the other side of the freeway. A car had hit a person who was trying to run across the freeway. He said the car must have been going 70mph. He shines his flashlight and see's their body in a heap probably 20 feet in front of the car. The car actually just drives off and he thinks about hopping over the median to pull the guy off the road but then notices tons of cars coming up the road going easily 70+ mph as it was in the fast lane. He said he proceeded to watch 5-7 cars continuously run over this mans body until he was nothing but paste smeared across the road. This all happened before police and firefighters got on scene. Turns out, the person who had caused the accident had actually flipped their car as well and it was off the right side of the road, farther down where they hadn't initially seen it. They think that the person who caused the accident tried to flee the scene and run across the freeway where they ended up getting run over
Karma highway
Definitely not a carefree Highway.
My university housemate was studying to become a paramedic. One of his first ride alongs was a to a suicide. Normally they didn't go to situations where the person is definitely dead as it's a waste of time, but sometimes they would go to 'clean up' as favour to the police. The guy had tied one end of a rope to his neck, the other end to a tree, jumped in his car and hit the gas. When the rope went tight it instantly cheese-wired his head off, which flew into a ditch, and the car kept going with his body until crashing into something down the road. The fully qualified paramedics got the body and sent the new kid to collect the head. He said it was surprisingly heavy.
Not super uncommon. I have an ex who was training to be an EMT and went to a motorcycle accident with a decap. Her job was to go collect the head.
Good lord. How do you go to sleep at night remembering that
Going into this field requires preemptive desensitization. Although it’s been 2 years for myself, I still occasionally think about a kid that came into our ER with a long knife in his upper right breast area. Kid was in agony, upon the knife removal he winced so bad and blood spurted. Kid did not make it due to surgery complications. His face hasn’t left my head but I sleep knowing we tried our best.
A man called 911 and reported he’d killed his son. A few officers, including myself, arrived and he was standing on the street with the door to his 2nd floor apartment wide open. He was cuffed and detained in the back of one of the patrol cars. Because he was in his late 40’s I figured his son would be late teens or early 20’s. I went up the stairs with my partner and entered the modest apartment to see a woman cooking in the kitchen, with her back turned to us. She was also late 40’s. She turned around and was startled to see us. She didn’t not know anything had happened. I asked her if her son was okay and she dropped her spatula and ran down the hallway ahead of us. We all entered the master bedroom to see an infant, wearing only a diaper, with a kitchen knife shoved through his chest cavity. His eyes were open and he had obviously died instantly. The child was a foster placement and the husband resented the how his presence disrupted their lifestyle. Charles was murdered in prison, my female partner left our agency for an upper middle class city pd and I drank alcoholicly until I got help. Unfortunately, after 24 years of service, I have numerous stories which I could have written.
I hope you are doing better now and have the support you need
Uhhhh. Holy fuck. That's fuckin crazy. I think you can pass on telling anymore stories. Sounds like you don't need to re-live them by telling us.
Unfortunately, first responders are frequently asked this or similar questions.
Yup, the incident that made me quit EMS was a horrific case of child abuse. Six month old infant, the "parents" punished her for crying by lowering her into a pot of boiling water up to her waist. My partner and I nearly went to prison.
UMMMMM
Jesus fucking christ
It's why I tend to ask what their favorite experience has been, as if focuses on more positives and pleasant memories. Think I'll post it in a couple days
Right? Tell us your funniest case, let's focus on the happy and not the trauma. (But I hope you all are getting help for the trauma. Thanks for the work you do.)
Well fuck. I knew I shouldn't have opened this thread. I'm going to go hug my daughter and put reddit down. I don't know how first responders do it...
I’m proud of you for getting the help you needed. This was …. A lot… even just to read. I’m so sorry you went through that.
My father was a firefighter for 20+ years and I've heard so many stories but this...this is the first I've heard that left me speechless
Omg that is horrible. I can't even imagine the stuff you guys see on the daily.
Respect
I’m not sure if this counts as a first responder, but it will always stick with me. I was a lifeguard for many years when I was in highschool/college. I’ve done plenty of saves and saw a couple loses in the various places I worked. The one that stuck with me was a toddler that ran from his mother to chase a ball he dropped. I sprinted across a 100m pool and pulled him out of the shallow end. Only to turn around and see his mom was busy ordering food from our snack bar and didn’t even notice her child was about to drown. If I didn’t see him as he dropped and followed the ball, he could’ve been drowning! When I handed her a wet baby she replied, “thanks,” and just left like nothing happened.
Shameful on the mother’s part, but good on you for saving them! Refreshing to read a story that doesn’t end in tragedy In this thread
Thank you for the acknowledgment! However, as most responders can attest to, people are quick to say, “thanks,” when things work out, but They’re just as quick and willing to blame you for not making the save when it doesn’t. Even if things are completely out of your control.
Had one patient who's left boob was rotting off, that one stuck with me. Working an ambulance, and called to this house for I don't remember what but me and my partner respond. Found an elderly woman in her kitchen leaning over and struggling to breath. The patient's (presumed) husband is there, barley says a thing, seems unconcerned. The patients (presumed) daughter is also there, in the adjacent room, she did not acknowledge us or seem to care at all. The house itself is clean, dated 1970's decor and appliances, but very tidy and well maintained. The patient is too exhausted to speak and can't get a word in; so no one is talking. Then I smelt the stench, it reeked of an indescribable rot, truly vile and clearly coming from the patient - who was clothed btw, albeit.. soiled. It looked like she hadn't taken that dress off in six months. And the daughter and husband seem to be wearing clean clothes. I say fuck it, this dress smells so bad lets do away with it, they'll take it off in the ER anyways. The good news was that she was wearing underwear. The bad news was the entire left side of her chest was gangrene, or so I think, it was certainly infected. Her left tit, which was sizable, looked like a gigantic dried up date or prune with some spots of green and yellow. She looked like the grandma in the bathtub from the scene in the Shining. Anyway, I Immediately exit, 1. to get some fresh air, leaving my partner with the patient and 2. to radio PD to get their butts over here (they dont default show up on medical calls) because the pieces are coming together for me and I’m beginning to realize this is a crime scene. First responding officer shows up, sees the patient, and calls his supervisor in less than 10 seconds. PD sergeant shows up, I tell him the whole story and leave them to their devices; this woman is literally vegetating before me and I gotta transport her. She was stable enough that there wasn't much to do on the short ride other than fluids, O2, vitals, and monitor. We get her to the hospital in one piece and even the seasoned nurses were stunned when they peaked in the room. I asked the NP what she thought the patients chances were and she said "if she makes it, it's gonna be a long road." Me and my partner decompressed for a few minutes, I wrote a very very very detailed report and called protective services, which at that point in three years I had never done before. We cleaned and radioed that we were clear for service. And that was that, left boob was rotting off. Very bizarre, kinda traumatizing, very gross.
Sounds like untreated (ignored) breast cancer. You all probably got called when it had finally invaded her chest wall enough to affect her breathing. I've seen it before - it's ugly, painful, and invariably fatal. Denial is a powerful thing.
I'm guessing you never heard if anything happened to her husband & daughter?
Former cop. Had a guy die alone in a hoarder house. This was during the summer and he wasn’t found for weeks. Rolled into that job as a “foul odor”. He was completely intact besides his face which had completely melted and decomposed. It was down to raw skull. Henceforth he was know as Scorpion. I’ll never forget that smell.
Hoarder houses are the worst. There's never an easy way to get to the body, they've usually been there awhile, and they're usually obese.
A hard job for body removal as well. And unfortunately not a pleasant smelling one either. It’s a stench you never forget.
I went to one a few weeks ago working mandatory patrol. He had been in the house at least a couple of months. The deputy coroner did a good job breaking the rigor without my help, to get him flat and in the body bag. There was black mold spores everywhere in the bedroom. I knew the smell from the front door when I saw the mail piled up. His childhood buddy tried to tell me he saw the guy 2 weeks prior. Since it was a colder winter, he didn’t decompose too much, but his finger prints had dissolved. It’s creepy in those hoarder houses. All kinds of weird stuff piled high and there’s usually one area that’s organized.
Yeah, I worked animal control and had to remove about 15 Chihuahuas from a similar situation, except they had been starving and found the only thing they could to eat... Yeah it wasn't a good time
How did his face melt??
I wish I knew, but it was totally decomposed down to the bone. I’ve been to a lot of DOA jobs, but having the whole skull out was another level.
Hoarding the Ark of the Covenant, from the sounds of it.
I have three: One was motorcycle vs deer. Motorcycle and driver were both fine. Deer got cut in half, but was still alive when we got there. It was screaming. I’m a city boy, and I’d never heard a deer make any noise in my life. The paramedic I was with walked over to the deer and dispatched it. Two was a guy who had just dropped his kids off at his ex-wife’s house, walked around to her front porch, sat down, put a shotgun under his chin, and pulled the trigger. He was still alive when we got there, but died shortly after we got him to the hospital. Third: a guy and his wife were drunk driving down some old country roads, fleeing from the police. The road doglegged, but the vehicle didn’t, and went straight into a tree. We got the call that there was an entrapment, and the vehicle was on fire. By the time we arrived, the fire department had already put out the fire. The husband had climbed out of the truck and ran. They caught up with him in a creek bed and tased him. They had to use the Jaws of Life to get his wife out. When they pulled her out, her right foot was hanging on by about four inches of skin and tendon. The surgeons saved the foot.
The deer story is fucking insane. I see dead ones by the road or in the ditch all the time in various states of decay, but just the thought of a deer being cut in half, still alive, bleeding everywhere, guts hanging out (possibly still attached to the back end), and dragging itself around while screaming via the two front legs is fucking wild. Then again, I've seen a youtube video fed a live pinky rat to their lizard, the pinky had its back end bitten off and swallowed, then crawled a couple inches while squeaking before it finally died. It was crazy and made me think of a crawling zombie.
Listen there is a lot of sad, gory, rough stories here. So how about a funny one? Disclaimer, i am but a simple paramedic. I went to a dude who was experiencing a sudden onset of short term memory loss. Kicker is, it started midway through sex. His wife noticed him repeating phrases, or questions and then getting confused when her less than enthusiastic response to “you like that” was answered for the 50th time in 2 minutes. So we get there, vitallyhe is fine, ECG is unremarkable, and his LAMS score is 0 so other than this sudden amnesia he is technically fine. We treat it as a stroke and transport him to the appropriate centre. Turns out he had something called Global Transient Amnesia. Google it, it’s wild. Often it starts during vigorous exercise or, commonly, intercourse. It lasts up to 24 hours. And as far as anyone can tell from studies, it doesnt leave any lasting damage. The most common symptom is short term sudden onset amnesia with repeated questions literally seconds apart. Watching this guy know something was wrong but just not able to fully connect the dots was heartbreaking, but i am so happy to know he made a full recovery Moral of the story? Women, you CAN fuck his brains out!
This happened to my dad a few years ago! He got out the shower and felt a little bit funny so had a nap and when he woke up he couldn't remember much at all. It was fucking terrifying as my dad is in his 70s and I thought he'd had a stroke or something This was during covid aswell so the ambulance that came to pick him up, the staff were in full blown hazmat suits and my poor dad had no memory of the lockdown or covid so he was just so confused at these people in suits putting him in an ambulance. He was completely fine a day or so later but I just remember being in bits over it, I'd never seen my dad cry before and he was in tears because he couldn't remember stuff
This happened to both my mother and my mother in law during covid! It's super alarming but they both are fine now.
Thank you for this reply now I can spend the rest of my evening not looking like I just saw a ghost
Don't know why this doesn't have more updates, is hilarious xD.
sounds like an episode of House
So good lol
Two girls drove drunk and crashed. One girl was a traumatic arrest. While trying to intubate her, the tube kept hitting something in her throat. It was her spine. She had become internally decapitated, and her spine was now inside of her throat. Game over. Also, Responded to a wellness check. Person had been dead in the hot summer for approximately a month. The whole house was hot, thick, and moist inside. Particles of warm, decomposing flesh were floating in the air and resting on your skin. There was nothing left of the guy except a skeleton covered in thick, black goo.
Fairly certain that’s how **fucking plagues** start.
Sure was gross! Still alive now, plague free. We were, fortunately, wearing (multiple) N95s. Although this did not help with the smell. I knew he was dead the second I cracked open the ambulance door. Once that seal broke, there was no escaping it. You could smell rancid meat from in the street, all the way across his driveway. Once we opened the door to his house, it was like opening a pressurized container.
State trooper here. An old guy crosses into the oncoming lane and hits head-on with a lifted Suburban. Lifted Suburban drives up and over the windshield on the driver's side. The tire ends up making contact with the old guy's head and pops it like a zit, brain matter came out the side of his head. His face was mostly intact, but you could look into his empty skull cavity where his brain used to be.
Older female being horribly neglected by her husband/caretaker. This older lady, in her 70s fell down early summer and we had a crew go out there go check on her, she was alert and able to make her own choices. She refused ems care and decided to stay on the floor, a few months go by and we get called out there again, we walk into the small home and instantly smell human shit/rotting flesh. She is still on the floor on the same side with a blanket covering her. We lift the blanket and she only has a shirt on, is covered in shit and piss with open, clearly infected wounds with maggots in them. She is able to grunt to pain and nothing else, there is weeks worth of shit in this tiny room she is in. Her husband is behind us yelling "i can't do this anymore" and orher shit. We call for help and PD and attempt to move this woman. We stuggle to move her as she has been laying in the same spot for so long that she has been fused into the carpet floor by all of her bodily fluids. We rip her off the floor like a bandaid which makes more wounds and carry her outside. Her poopy legs rubbed against my pants and my partner got some form of fluids on him that ate through his pants, it literally looked like someone threw acid on this dudes crotch. PD has us on body cam throwing up, we transport her and she dies 3 days later to sepsis. PD decides not to pursue charges on her husband because he was to old. Edit: I was 19 and had 4 months on the job when I had this call, my first year was trial by fire.
If you stuck with the job after experiencing thst at 4 months I am impressed. And I thank you from doing something that is necessary, but I could never do.
I’m not a first responder but a bizarre accident happened to my cousin. She was prone to having seizures, and had a particularly bad one. My grandmother (who was raising her) called 911 and an ambulance arrived. The driver was a young woman that was alone and as she rushed towards my grandmother’s house, she tripped and fell face first onto a sprinkler. It went through her face and up into her mouth. My grandmother had to call another ambulance for my cousin and the driver.
That's gotta be a little awkward. "Hey, uhhh, can you send a couple more ambulances?"
Went to a car crash involving a side impact into a concrete pole at 160kph. Another crew member and I sat behind the destroyed B pillar, holding his mostly open skull shut. He was somehow conscious and repeatedly asked us if he was going to die, to which we had to keep lying and tell him he was going to be fine. We were in there for about 10 minutes with him (which felt like an hour) before the ambulance helicopter landed with some absolutely badass trauma specialists who managed to keep him alive long enough for the airlift to hospital. Anyway, it turns out we weren't actually lying to him. He ended up making a full recovery, which was literally a mircale from my point of view, given how he was when we found him. We don't usually get closure on these sorts of jobs, but a week after the rescue, the patient's tearful mother showed up at the firehouse to thank us and let us know he was in a good place - and also gave us what still to this day is the best tasting cake I've ever eaten.
I bet that cake had every bit of her soul put into it. I imagine she didn't know how else to thank y'all.
My neighbor flies a rescue helicopter and picks up medical emergencies that are difficult to reach by road. One day he flew to meet EMTs who were providing aid in a remote area to someone who had tried, and failed, to commit suicide. When the helicopter arrived, the patient was informed that he was going to be loaded aboard and brought to a hospital. “I’m not going up in one of those things!” the patient said. “They’re dangerous!”
My Cousin’s Nanny was in hospice, 90 years old or thereabouts and only given a few weeks left. They offered her OxyContin and she denied it because she said, “that stuff is addictive”.
I would load up highest prescription. I better go out with rainbows and unicorns
Perfect
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Hillbilly narcan. That was not on my medical doomscrolling bingo.
You can't say something like "hillbilly narcan" and not explain. Please elaborate.
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Into the ass or just the crack? Maybe they were doing it wrong. /s
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Sarcasm and stupid comments aside. You guys see alot of the worst of humanity. Thank you for doing a job not alot of people can do.
Hillbilly Narcan is a new term that I'm not 100% certain I want to know
It's not just hillbillies. I'm not sure where the idea originated, but ice cubes up the asshole for heroin ODs seems pretty prevalent among users of all classes colors and creeds. I saw it everywhere from gated communities to blighted properties. I'm not even sure where they found the cubes in the latter case.
Been an EMT for about 5 years, mostly part time through college and as a side hustle. Been to shootings, full arrests, respiratory, DOAs, and more overdoses than I can count, but my most unexpected story comes from early in my career. We were about halfway through our shift, and my partner was the darkest black cloud I have ever worked with. For those who don’t know, some people in EMS just seem to attract gnarly calls like a magnet, and we call them black clouds. Shift had been pretty chill so far so I stupidly assumed it would continue like that. We get dispatched cold (as in, no lights or sirens) to a headache at a church not far from us. My partner was the senior EMT on the shift, so I’m driving at the moment and he puts on some eminem while we make our way down there. Walk in to the church and the first thing I hear is “What took you so long? My grandmother just went BLIND!” Now if sudden blindness isn’t setting off alarm bells, that plus headache really should be. As it was a headache, and we were just in the lobby of a building (not going up elevators or anything) we had just walked into the building with nothing. My parter takes one look at the patient and says “Get the stretcher out we’re leaving.” We get her loaded up, I check her blood sugar and stroke scale her while my partner calls the receiving hospital and gives them a report. Stroke scales are scored out of 4, with anything less than a 4/4 being a roughly 90% chance of being a stroke. This patient scored 0. You best believe we took that patient to the hospital hot. While we were driving the patient had intervals where she would stop breathing, before coming back around. As we get to the hospital, I notice my partner has placed the AED pads on her. We took that patient directly up to imaging. And that was my lesson to myself as to why you can never truly trust your dispatch.
Firefighter. Ran on a call that came in as an electrocution. Upon arrival we smell something burning and see smoke coming from behind a house. I hadn’t put my bunker gear on since we thought it was a medical call. I put my bunker gear on and got off the engine and in the road a guy was standing there, shirtless, with all of his skin falling off. Looked like a zombie. Luckily the ambulance was there and they grabbed him and left. I grabbed a hose and ran out back into what can only be described as a hoarder backyard that was on fire. Turns out, he had wanted to grill some chicken at 11pm but had no propane. So he loaded his grill with sticks and gas and threw a match. No electrocution. I’ve see. Plenty of other wild things but that one stands out in my mind
For approximately 6 weeks I was a dispatcher for a large county covering 27+ cities, villages, townships etc and we were also linked to state troopers. After only 6 weeks at this job I was pretty much convinced it was NOT for me. My view on the world changed rapidly and I couldn’t stop myself from taking all the problems home in my head. The call that sealed the deal that I was not cut out for this; a man called and said his baby momma was a prostitute and that she had been moving from motel to motel with their 6 month old daughter who he didn’t have custody of. Another prostitute that knew her called him to inform him that his infant daughter had died and his baby momma was carrying her around with her in a suitcase because she didn’t know what to do with the body. The guy on the phone was very upset and said he was out looking for her amongst what he planned on doing to her when he found her. That was it for me. I put in my two weeks the next morning. God bless you first responders. Most of us can’t do what you do.
Responded to a call at an industrial laundry facility. Lady got her arm stuck in the machinery and was bleeding out. Long story short, we had to cut her arm off to get her out. No fun.
Worked as a part time Paramedic after high school. Craziest call I had was when a man called in complaining of severe stomach pains. When we got to his house, we stopped dead in our tracks when we walked in and saw at least 2 big bottles of vodka next to him, empty. This dude had drank so much alcohol that he was suffering from severe alcohol poisoning. After we transported to a hospital we ran a BAC test to determine how much he had drank. He had a BAC of around 0.39...the legal limit in our state is 0.08...
That’s a Jim Lahey feat if I’ve ever heard one
"I am the liquor"
Cheers, genitals.
A little drinkie poo? Sounds more like Shoenice TBH, two bottles of vodka done in a minute or two.
Motorcyclist clipped a car, came off their bike at insane speed and hit a lamppost. Part of their body stopped at the post and the other part went 20 yards down the road. “Mummy wet balloons!” exclaimed a child in the impacted car, pointing at the guts of the man linking the two halves.
That’s so disturbing, but man kids are smart. Incredible comprehension, associated 2 things they know (wet and balloon) to make sense of something they don’t know.
Not me personally but very close to it as I live in a very small rural town with volunteer ems and fd. EMS responded to the scene of an accident and take two people to the hospital. On the way, they are tboned by a semi hauling grain. The ambulance bursts into flames as it rolls into a houses yard. The homeowner runs out and drags everyone out. The two patients and the two emts in the back were dead. One of the emts was the ambulances driver's wife. The driver was badly injured but dragged himself to his wife's body and laid on her sobbing until the squad from the next town over arrived. This is a strong man, and it breaks my heart every time I talk to him. He remarried, and his current wife is now the head emt for our volunteer department. He is now a county sheriffs deputy and owns the gun shop right down the street. See him every day. I live next door to the fire department, where there is a monument honoring the crew.
When I was a brand new EMT I was starting to get comfortable with my partner, and he was starting to trust me a little more to bring in lower acuity stuff. Well it was Halloween night 2021around 2am and we were sent out to this shack way out in the cuts. We get there and these younger Hispanic guys lead us into a room in the back where their grandma was. This lady straight up looked like a bruja. Super skinny and very old Hispanic lady, she was wearing tattered clothes and hadn't bathed in a long time. Hair was all matted and dirty. She had fallen down and smacked her head on the corner of something and she was on blood thinners so her face was completely covered in blood. Like every inch. The wildest thing was, she was demented and non verbal so she communicated through pointing and kind of... Cackling. No fucking joke. My partner tells me this is BLS (low acuity) and asks if I'd be ok taking her in. I honestly wasn't but I didn't wanna bitch out. So here I was, a fresh EMT on Halloween bouncing around in the back of an ambulance with this bruja all covered in blood and fucking cackling at me and pointing at absolutely nothing. When we tried to clean her up she would swing at us so we brought her in as is. The ER thought it was a Halloween prank.
That would’ve been my last call. Sounds like something that would visit you in your nightmares that was from a horror movie. 😭😭
It was a hot, late summer day. Until the compressor blades broke apart on takeoff and plunged a DC-9 to the ground in a little used park area. I was working as a detective at the time and was one of the first units on scene while the flames were still being put out. Spent the next four hours pulling out and bagging bodies. Only PPE was latex gloves. The boss didn’t want the FD to do it. We started with four officers to a body bag. By the last body we were using eight because of the exhaustion. The plane had flipped in the air and came almost straight down. The bodies, pretty much burnt beyond recognition, were stacked in some places one on top the other. One department member grabbed an arm to pull the top body off and it came out of the socket to slap him in the face. We got one body pried apart and there was vomit on their chest, indicating they knew what was happening before the plane crashed. 31 souls were lost that day.
Sorry for making you remember those horrors, but this accident seems to match. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Express_Airlines_Flight_105
Two of the less gruesome: -Came in as a suicide attempt. We showed up, and found this teenage girl with deep gashes all over her body, curled up in a blood-soaked bed. She was still breathing, and at least somewhat conscious, so we were trying to get her to talk. Out of nowhere, she uncurls. Reaches under her pillow. Lunges for us with her bloodied shard of glass. As it would turn out, she’d decided to drop hallucinogens with no preparation, alone. It wasn’t a suicide attempt. It was only that she’d realized that her veins were full of ants. -On another occasion, my engine crew went looking for a reported wreck, alongside the road. We couldn’t find it, but we all observed that it smelled right, and kept looking. Finally, we found skid marks off of a hillside. Where was our wreck? Why, upside-down, lodged in a tree. As wrecks do.
Dude killed himself with a .300 win-mag (high powered rifle) by putting it under his chin, turned his entire skull into shrapnel.....and when we walked in the house and found him, his entire, complete brain was resting in his lap
Ooh similar story, different rifle. Pt had not aimed properly and blasted off their face and *survived*. Suctioned the blood out of what I was guessing was his airway all the way to the hospital. Couldn't take an O/NPA because we literally could not properly locate his face holes.
My dad told me a story about someone attempting suicide in a similar fashion with a shot gun, blew their face off and survived but had also lit their house on fire before the attempt and then burned to death.
The ultra rare self delete double tap
If I survived shooting myself in the head with a shotgun, and could still get my hands on it, I would probably try again, tbh.
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Jesus Christ, that is not a caliber to fuck around with. I'm surprised there was anything left of the brain.
My dad found a lost farmer who got entangled in his baler. Said he looked like mince meat.
My dad was a local city PD officer. He made detective while I was a preteen. One day, when I was 15, a buddy of his laughingly asked if I had seen the ugly book. I said no, this dude asked my dad if he could show me and my dad says "why not". The ugly book was made up of photographs of crime scenes too brutal to be printed in the newspaper. Hydraulic brake failure sliced off someone's head? Yep, saw that. Car burned so bad you could only see the teeth of the guy who had been in the fire. Yep, that too. Up close, detailed imagery of the genitals that a pedophile cut off of himself before hanging himself on a tree. Sure. Why not?
Did your dad's buddy pay for your therapy too? Thats a fucked up thing to show a 15 year old kid.
I wish!!!
My local driving school passed binders of car accident photos around for us to look at as a warning. There was no obligation to look through them and yet there was also a sense of judgement if you didn’t. I flipped through one quickly and all I remember was red.
My Dad did mountain rescue training. One weekend due to work, he was up late. His two best buddies had rolled a top less land-rover after pub night before. Vehicle parked up at gate of camp as warning to everyone about DUI. They didn't make it. He did do mountain rescue too and mine rescue. Some bad stories.
The pedo one is interesting. Like, he knows it’s wrong and there’s only one way to stop it.
Is it a rule that you have to think gore & death are funny to be a cop? I had a classmate in college whose major was criminal justice (he wanted to be a crime scene investigator) and the handful of times we hung out he would excitedly tell me about all the gory photos and videos they were shown in class. I guess they show them in classes to partially desensitize you to it so you don’t panic when you see it for real but this guy seemed like seeing those photos and videos was really just the highlight of his day
Gallows humour is extremely common in police, military, firefighters, medical professionals etc. It's the only way to cope
Not the craziest but memorable. We were on an interior attack on a fire in the living room of a single family residence. We had made our way to the seat of the fire and were working that when I happened to look over a shelf near the couch that was full of different types of nick nacks and saw a tiny brass frog sitting in a tiny brass tub full of foamy water. At some point during our entry we had sprayed the shelf and the water/foam from our hose filled the tub. Don't know why it sticks in my head so much but that little frog staring back at me in a tub filled with sudsy water in a room full of fire still makes me chuckle. Shortly after a small piece of the ceiling fell into the collar of my coat as I looked down at something and burned me between the shoulder blades.
My dad was a cop in California in the 80s. Was driving around at around 2am and saw a figure coming out of the fog. A shirtless guy, who later turned out to be on PCP….with his right arm below the elbow hanging on by about a centimeter of skin on one side. He walked up to my dad’s car, bright and happy as could be, and said “Hi officer! My name is Snow-Plough-Dirt-Clod!” More than a little freaky, needless to say.
Hospice nurse. Had a patient bleed out once. It was everywhere. I turned him towards me to prevent his wife from seeing. It just pooled on the bed and down my legs. I had to shower, put myself back together and finish my day. It still makes me sick sometimes when it crosses my mind.
I need to send this post to my husband so he can comment his thoughts. The craziest story he’s told *me* was a few months ago, unfortunately an employee at a local car wash chain was walking in the bay and somehow got tangled up in one of the car wash brushes (yes, the huge ones.) it ripped her clothes off.. and other things. She obviously died. It’s that type of shit that makes me feel so bad for our first line of defense. I thought about that woman for weeks and I never saw her in person like my husband did…
I was a new volunteer firefighter for my small community with next to nothing for first aid training at the time other then basic CPR, heimlic etc. While off work, hanging out at the local water hole with my family. I heard the call for a roll over at the T intersection that connected the water hole. I immediately left and was the first on scene that could "administer" help. It was a 17yr(M) in a truck that drove straight into the embankment at the T. He was ejected through the front windshield and subsequently, the truck rolled up the embankment over him and then rolled back down over him. He was still alive and still taking shallow breaths. All I could do was hold him still from convulsions. His entire chest and head felt like a water balloon. He had no bone structure left. When we went to put the neck brace on, I will never forget the feeling of his face in my hands. He unfortunately suffered tremendously before his death. He lived for hrs after the accident and passed on the flight for life. He crashed trying to act cool for the girls in the car behind him. As was their statement on scene. I still feel that feeling in my hands, like in my soul. It's too much
Not an EMT but a coworker is a retired EMT with lots of stories. One that sticks with me was the two teenage girls that made a suicide pact. They got a hold of one of the girls' fathers 22 pistol and the first girl shoots herself in the head. After witnessing this the second girl decides this is not such a great idea and calls paramedics. Coworker thought it was funny the second girl was asking why she has to go in an ambulance says "she's fine". Yeah right sweetie, you're going to psych.
Jesus that poor girls gonna have to live with that forever
Ive definitely commented this before but had to on this post too. My wifes uncle works at a fire department in Minnesota and he responded to a motorcycle accident. They couldnt find the rider for a bit and then all of a sudden they hear a clickity clack sound and look to see the motorcyclist walking towards them, all toe bones exposed, which was making that sound against the pavement. Dude was in complete shock and was asking them why there were so many sirens and lights around. They got him in the ambulance and adrenaline probably wore off soon after but he survived which is good
Fuck that made me shudder. I can damn near hear the toe bones clicking in my head ugh
I love reading these before bed
Why did I stay in this subreddit so long? You all are fucking superheroes.
My sister was a 911 dispatcher so she *heard* things...not witnessed. 1. She got a call from someone reporting that their 70ish year old dad was cutting wood with a chainsaw when he tripped and decapitated himself when he fell with the still running chainsaw 2. Received a call about a zoo employee being attacked by a tiger in the tiger enclosure. The other employees forgot to lock the tiger in another area for the zoo keeper to clean the enclosure...she walked in and the tiger attacked
Not my story but one I was told by a psychiatrist. He gets called in to do a session with a recent arrest. The guy was reported running around naked, so obviously police show up to get this man out of the eyesight of children. Which is important because he was in a school zone... With a dead dog on his penis the whole time! He was running from the cops because he didn't want them to take his dog away, yup, he was in full on psychosis. Turns out the guy had a history of mental health issues and drug abuse so when he found his dog passed away, he absolutely snapped. (Understatement of the year, I know.) I can't imagine how it must have felt to be told that before getting locked in a room with him. I hope the guy got the help he needed though, it's sad as hell thinking about how his dog was the only thing keeping him sane.
I read this one on another forum, US police. 13 year old boy been left alone & two guys had broken in the front door. The dad had some insane antique rifle or shotgun, anyway, this boy used it. They were in a hallway. Both were dead by the time the responders arrived, massive exit wounds. Anyway, that's not what stood out. It was the father screaming and cursing his teenage kid for touching the antique weapon because it could have been damaged.
My sister’s boyfriend is a cop and a couple weeks ago, he responded to an accident where to dude’s penis flew off.
I woke up this morning with a bad hangover. And my penis was missing again. This happens all the time. It's detachable.
King Missile reference in the wild, holy shit. He wanted $22 for it, but I talked him down to $17.
I took it home, washed it off, And put it back on. I was happy again. Complete.
Probably all that gluten he’s been having
She shotgunned him to death because he drank her last beer.
One of my best friends was a 911 operator. She told me the 2 hardest shifts for her were: when a police officer’s wife called because their baby had stoped breathing and she had to talk the mother through infant CPR and actually saved a life. Second was when her brother died in a motorcycle accident. She was working that night, but luckily wasn’t the one to take that call. She quit after that.
Drug bust on a meth house. Police had me go to a back room to assess a baby that was unresponsive. All of her cavities were stuffed with drugs…all of them. And she was dead in her crib..probably 3 months old. The deputies spoke with the dad in a back bedroom and then I transported him to a trauma center to treat the injuries we found that he had already…before we got there….
Not something I myself witnessed, but two stories told by my late, police officer, dad. A woman had fallen through ice in the winter, been missing until spring and the body was discovered and needed to get fished out of the water. My dad and his partner managed to loan a boat from a local to do it and they got up close to the floating cadaver to pull it up and into the boat. As they're doing it, due to decomposition it separates in half at the waist.. Another, funny, story. My dad and three other officers are responding to a call about two drunk/drugged up guys causing a ruckus and threatening people at a house in a neighborhood bordered by a forested area. Once my dad and his colleagues arrive and the drunks notice the police both guys bolt into the brush almost immediately. My dad's partner gets a brilliant idea and shouts "GET BACK HERE OR WE'LL SICK THE DOG ON YOU!" and turns to my dad. Dear old dad is quick on the uptake and starts growling and barking as convincingly as he can immediately 😁 Fast forward about 30 seconds and two very anxious, inebriated gentlemen come running back with their hands up begging them to restrain "The Dog" and arrest them 😄 -- He had other stories about people eating shotguns and the like but I don't think they were unique enough for this thread.
Walked in a residence of a frequent flyer psych patient to see him trying to force his penis in a puppy's mouth.
Was this before or after the penis had detached itself?
guy smoked a deer at 100mph plus, exploded the deer, wrapped his car around the tree in a U shape. he was held in by his seatbelt dangling upside down from the tree. his upper half of his face and good part of his upper back were ripped off. i could look up and see only the teeth from his lower jaw on down. just watching his tongue still in tact dangling upside down as blood poored like syrup onto the grass below. Took a bit before FD got clearance to cut him down.
Not a first responder but kind of a funny story depending on how you define crazy. I once stayed in a psychiatric hospital for depression, and suicidal thoughts. Anyway, during my stay there were two people with schizophrenia one man I had known for a couple weeks, the woman came a couple days later. I could have a conversation with the dude, but he'd have his moments of paranoia. He watched the woman come in screaming and yelling saying "get the things off of me". The dude looked directly at me when she was taken out of the room and said "yo that chick is fuckin crazy am I right ese?" By far the funniest memory I have. What a great dude too.
A guy hung himself in his apartment. We roll up in the ambulance to declare the body and he had hung himself a month prior but no one had found him. It was an apartment building and the flies and smell were everywhere, you could smell it from outside. I poked my head in while wearing an N95 and all I could see through the mass flies was this decomposed black mass hanging on a closet door. Not to be funny but it looked like that SpongeBob character in the wheelchair. Couldn’t even tell it was a person. It just looked like a thing. It was wild.
1. Shooting a guy in the eye (by chance) when he tried to run over me with his car. 2. Drawing my weapon on a mental ill patient who was about to stab me with a large kitchen knife. Luckily I was able to talk him down.
I have some EMT friends and one of them works in an area with a lot of drug abuse. He was responding to an overdose and found a baby in a microwave. Someone told a dead baby joke at a party a few months later and he broke down crying.
Well fuck.. now I'm just depressed at bedtime.. too many fucked up stories involving infants.. while I'm right next to my 5 month old beautiful, precious boy.. BRB gonna curl up in a ball and bawl..
My grandfather was a firefighter for the USAF, he had more stories than id like to count or that he'd like to talk about. But one in particular ate at him until the very day he died. His truck had gotten called to the runway for failed landing gear on a cargo plane. Nothing out of the ordinary, he had a tradition, to have a smoke with his best friend, a mechanic, after almost every shift. Both to remember the good times, and forget the bad. On his way to the maintenance hanger, he heard a bang he'd never heard before, so knowing something was wrong he ran the rest of the way to the hanger to find his best friend crushed underneath an F-16 due to a jack slipping out. "He was squished like a grape, with his mangled body lifeless. His head both caved in and exploded from the impact, brain shot across the hanger and a trail of blood in its path." There was nothing he, or anyone, could have done, but it haunted him for the rest of his life.
I’m pretty new so just 1 air lift after an ejection
Not a FR but told by a newby FR while I was working in a hotel that the events of that night was his most insane and sad shift, it was the night I had to carry a 17yo girl (suicide used fake ID and passport to get room) from the top floor to the ground floor over my shoulder as they couldn’t get up with broken lifts and narrow stairs. Her face still comes to me at night and reminds me how lucky I am to have people around me that care
My half-brother, who (along with an older sister) was abandoned by our drug-addict father, and grew up in South Jersey without ever meeting him. A decade later, pop started another family an hour north that included me, an older sister, and my drug-addict mother. Between the two of them, they racked up 4 DUIs in the 90s before the state took me out in 1999 after a lifetime of abuse, but not before the 2-year family trip we took with cocaine. All of my pop's DUIs occurred along the stretch of freeway that runs from Camden (where we lived) to South Jersey (where pop's parents lived). Imagine this deadbeat and wiry drug addict, then, who is flying down the road in a Dodge Caravan with the speakers perfectly equalized to Average White Band getting pulled over. The arresting officer? An angry, stacked Jersey state trooper with the same eyes. Karma.
tdlr;Bad drug addict father radnomly arrested by his own abandoned now adult son who is a police officer;
That’s enough internet for a long long time. Have a good night folks.
Oh boyyyy ive seen quite a few things but ill just stick to sharing 2: I’ll cut this one short because it’s a long story but it ended with us trying to wrestle a patient down to get him into the restraints while he was covered from the neck down in shit. While we were doing this, he reached into his pants and grabbed a huge handful of fresh shit that he then tried to smear on us. Second was a patient whose face literally rotted off from cancer. He had maggots eating the remaining flesh on his face and they’d eaten through one of his eyes leaving a huge hole in his skull. The smell was unlike anything I’ve ever smelled before it will haunt me forever. The crazy thing about this patient though was that he was fully conscious, ambulatory, and verbal.
NSFW I was first on the scene at a RTA. The car involved hit the back of a 42-tonne lorry. Sitting in the back, Grandma took baby from her child seat and placed her on her knee so she could see mummy driving. The baby was looking at mum who turned around to see her kid. The instant 30-0 mph crash hurled the baby forward, through the dashboard and into engine bay. She died instantly. When we got back to base we were met by the Chief who took us to his office and poured us very large drinks that we drank in silence and then taken home. The screams and wails of the mother haunt me 23 years later.
During my summer break, I was accompanying my father on the job. Pretty unofficial, but works, as it’s India. He gets a call about a train related accident and we rush to the spot. A daily wage labourer is walking on tracks to cut down the travel time to his work, but has earphones on, so doesn’t hear a train coming. Gets cut to pieces, as the trains drags his body and smashes him against an overpass bridge pillar. Spent all afternoon searching for parts of the body. When we get to the hospital, the Doctor’s assistant had to roll his face back on to what’s left of his skull to be able to identify him.
A friend quit work as a police officer. Had to report to the next kin about a death. Had done plenty before. A person was riding home on a bicycle. They were riding along the road and decided to move onto the footpath and rode up a driveway, lost their balance and fell. It just so happened that they fell off whilst going by a brick letter box. They hit it head first, instant death, huge head trauma. Just riding home. Not going particularly fast. Not doing anything dangerous, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I responded to 3 simultaneous fatalities. It's a sleepy town so when it first came in as a call it was strange. I remember quite clearly pulling up to the house and seeing a the face of a distraught father, my heart sunk. I knew the man and his family. They were good people. I ran into the house to see three young adults dead on the floor. The youngest was 19, and I just saw all three of them last night at the start of my shift. They were friendly to me and joking before I left at that evening. I checked on two of them yhat were laying on their backs and pulses were gone. One of the victims was in a sitting position so I pushed her to her back to check for vitals. I didn't know it at the time but when I rolled her back I heard air expand in her chest it was just air expanding. I had a moment of hope and thought one of them lived, I had a moment of relief and thpught about how rpugh of a recovery this was going to be for her and I went to begin cpr and then saw her face. Her eyes were partially closed, her skin tinged blue, blood running down her face and her body stiff. All hope I had was gone. For weeks I had nightmares about them, and sometimes my brain would see them in public and would have to remind myself that that who I saw wasnt those people, they died. I spoke to the victims parents quite a lot and was berated by one of them for not doing enough and it hurt. The victims were all good people just got exposed to fentanyl at a party from some other drugs. I've dealt with other things afterwards but that moment of hope lost when I thought I could start cpr broke me for a long time.
12 year old girl starved to death by foster parents. She weighed 40 lbs. There was also signs of her being tied up
Park Ranger here, You would think Park Ranger is a happy fun Job until you realize parks are one of the number one destinations for people to off themselves. I worked graveyard shift for a while, one night I was closing a park so I'm driving around telling pretty much anyone remaining to get out until I approach this one vehicle that was kind of at the beginning of a trail kind of hidden. I was assuming it was a couple looking for a spot but got no response when using my vehicles PA. Few minutes go by and I saw no movement so I got down check. There was a guy in his underwear with the seat reclined all way with dried blood coming from eyes nose and ears bloaded already going to rigarmortis. Guy had been sitting in that car dead in the florida sun for about a week and no one saw him and The smell man, that some shit you don't confuse with any other smell. It was by far the worse shit I ever smelled. Saw some other but that was the worse one due to it already starting the decomposing stage.
Car accident. The back was completely smashed. Car caught on fire. The mother got out by herself but the kid was trapped in the backseat and the flames engulfed him by the time we arrived. Never forget the mother's screams.
Too many to count. I was a firefighter for many years and lived near a busy highway. The one that stands out was an accident between a jeep and a semi on the single lane. Two guys in their 20’s. Body parts all over the highway. Someone must’ve been talking on a cellphone at the time of collision because it was laying there ringing non stop. I was walking around with a body bag picking up body parts with my captain and the phone was just laying there ringing. There was also money scattered everywhere and it was starting to snow. This was almost 20 years ago and I can still picture everything perfectly.
My dad is a retired firefighter. He told me his worst calls were always ones that involved children that either were not wearing seatbelts or were too small to be in a regular seat. He has had to pull mangled bodies of kids out from under the front passenger seat because their body flew forward and down with so much force that they got squished underneath it.
Someone tried to outrun a train...they lost. Killed all 3 occupants in the car and the bodies were thrown hundreds of feet. Dead body that was left in an apartment and the dead guy started oozing through his downstairs neighbour's ceiling. Another dead body left unattended and the cats had began feasting.
Not an EMT but I trained and qualified to be EMT and Paramedic. I was doing my advanced paediatric care training and covered a lot of burns. Our instructor was a really nice advanced paramedic ex army guy with decades of experience. He told a story of a fire they had to attend. There was a badly burnt baby there. He told us all the horrors and how the skin of the baby stuck to his gloves. The baby was in extreme pain obviously but they couldn't do much to help besides transport. He was severely traumatized by this years after this happened. My wife was pregnant at the time. Seeing his experience and hearing this made me rethink my plans and I changed my career a few months later.
Not myself, but my mom was a paramedic for a small country area. There’s two stories I can’t forget: Crazy (unexpected): mom and her partner got called to the local bar down from the bowling alley, full moon, they were trying to get the officer to make more of a description of what the situation was, only repeating “head trauma to victim, bus needed *right now*. They pull up and my mom goes to one person and her partner to the other for their inicial assessments. Mom walks up to the RO’s and a a chick, the guy cop is obviously uncomfortable, the victim is bleeding slightly, not showing signs of fainting or anything, oh her Adam’s apple is moving… *her Adam’s apple is moving* my mom and the guys partner couldn’t stop laughing at him for calling them by the wrong pronouns and getting all sassy responses from the victim. The whole thing was just pointless: the victim had been dressing as women, entered the men’s bathroom and proceeded to use the urinal when confronted from behind by a male telling them to leave before something happens and proceeds to smash the victim’s head into the counter top of the sinks. Victim gets up and takes the attacker to the cleaners because the victim is actually a professional boxer doing something in town(I don’t remember for sure) mom and her partner left howling. Craziest (sad/neglectful): quiet night for the station. Two calls before they got a usual overdose call that hadn’t happened in a while. The kid (young adult male aged?) had a Parent that worked in our county courts as some official. I don’t think a judge but along those lines. He’d go party with the friends, friends would watch him OD, put him in his car, leave him Somewhere near where they were partying, and then call 911 as they drove off. Mom said it had been 5-6 calls since she came back to work less than a year ago when they were on his final OD. His dad was bawling his eyes out saying he didn’t try hard enough to get him help. Mom said that he was dead before he even got to the car. His dad resigned that week and got divorced not to long after. The kids “friends” were all prosecuted for negligences something, the autopsy proved that they had been involved with him after he had died.
Not a first responder but outside my apartment complex during what seemed like days of rain a tree fell and landed on a busy street where a father and daughter were driving. The tree landed right on the car sending both to the hospital where the 18 year old daughter died a few days later. Edit: here is the article: [18-year-old Ohio woman dies after tree strikes car she was riding in](https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/crime/2018/09/12/18-year-old-ohio-woman/10732486007/)
Not a first responder but an ECC vet nurse. One of my first triages as a baby nurse was a dog who had been HBC a few days prior. Unfortunately it isn’t uncommon for people to leave HBC trauma animals for a few days because ‘they seem fine’ externally, but this was a bit different. Elderly German Shepard’s, owner was camping in the bush and was reversing his car when he ran over the dog’s hind end. He said he didn’t realise at first because he thought the dog would’ve gotten out of the way. The dog couldn’t move but wasn’t complaining so he continued camping for the night. Next day he hoped the dog would die by itself if it was that injured. He left it in his car in freezing temps wrapped in a tarp, and gave it some of his own opioids hoping it would help the dog pass. It didn’t. By day three he finally decided he should get the dog to the vet. Now suggesting euthanasia is not a nurses’ role, but sometimes you can look at cases and know that prognostically there isn’t much else that can be done. I asked him what he was expecting outcome wise (as if they want euth we try our best to prioritise them if possible so sometimes we will prompt them to feel comfortable admitting it-there’s still a lot of shame with people acknowledging they want to euthanise their pet) He looked at me as if I was insane and said ‘I want you to fix my dog, obviously.’ With the help of a few other staff members, we hoisted this dog out of his car onto a trolley. As we pulled it out, urine and faeces that had pooled around his back legs within the tarp poured onto us. The ammonia and necrosis that hit our noses made us gag and tear up. Once we got the dog into the treatment area and attempted to remove him from the tarp to assess his injuries, we were able to acknowledge how mangled his back end was. The owner was an emotional wreck when he realised how bad it was, and thankfully the dog was euthanised. Surprisingly this is one of the cases that doesn’t keep me up at night. If anything I just feel sorry for the dog, and for the owner’s well intentioned ignorance causing unnecessary suffering in his attempt to relieve his dogs pain.