Website / Not Always Healthy

Not Always Healthy is a sister site^note well, not really, since it was the first category added after the prior sites were consolidated into the main URL to Not Always Right, added to the site's rotation in 2017. As the name suggests, the website hosts stories taking place at the doctor's office and hospitals. Stubborn doctors, cranky patients, crazy injuries, laughing gas antics, and more run rampant here. As usual, it's best to take these stories with a grain of salt.

Not Always Healthy contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: The poster of this story explains that she has a pathological fear of needles thanks to something her egg donor did to her, which, combined with her being on the autism spectrum, sent her into a panic-related meltdown when she had to have the HPV vaccination. In the comments section, she explains what it was: Egg Donor had the kid's ears pierced when she was still a toddler, and then routinely re-pierced them herself with a blunt sewing needle every time they tried to heal up.
• Accidental Pun: This poster had to go through a lot of bureaucratic nonsense before he could get surgery for testicular cancer, specifically removing one testicle. The surgery's finally been scheduled,
  Doctor: ... but now that we've got the ball rolling —
  Poster: Pun intended?
• Accidental Truth: This doctor proclaims a healthy newborn daughter, only to be corrected by the father. As an adult, the subject transitioned to a woman, so the doctor was correct after all.
• Adorably Precocious Child: "... But from now on, calling the CDC is my job, not yours."
• Afraid of Needles: The submitter of this story had this fear as a small child... which caused trouble when he has a vaccination appointment and a nurse pops in to the room to grab a massive bone marrow aspiration needle. Luckily, the doctor clears everything up.
• Alcohol-Induced Stupidity: "HE'S DRUNK AND STUPID!!"
• Armor-Piercing Question: A woman convinced her daughter is too thin goes to doctor after doctor, trying to find one who will agree. Finally one gets fed up and asks "Are you trying to sell her by weight?", startling her into realizing how irrational her complaints are.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • This horrible cook thought that allergies were just excuses to be picky and could be corrected via exposure, along with having no concept of kitchen hygiene or why cross-contamination is a bad thing. She's arrested after the police discover that she put several of the camp counselors she cooked for in the hospital by deliberately sneaking allergens into their food. ^note  While allergies can be mitigated to an extent by exposure, doing so involves tiny amounts of the allergen, is done in a hospital so help is immediate in case anything goes wrong, and does not involve assuming that allergies are imaginary and dumping allergens into food.
  • This nurse doesn't realize that certain kinds of hemophilia do affect women. She ends up fired after she doesn't believe a patient's explanation to this effect and tries to sneak her an anti-clotting medication (which the patient didn't need, because the hemophilia meant her blood already had trouble clotting).
  • This doctor refuses to accept that the patient has an ear infection, because adults don't get ear infections.
  • This nurse refuses to believe the OP weighs enough to donate blood, claiming that their having passed a stool since weighing themselves will account for the discrepancy. When the OP argues that they can't possibly lose that much in one trip to the bathroom, the nurse claims "You'd be surprised." That would, indeed, be surprising; the "discrepancy" was 5kg, just over 11lbs. The only way a human could have that much poop in them is if they were constipated for about a month, by which time they'd probably have died from a ruptured bowel.
  • Women can only be colorblind if both parents are, so the submitter's father must be someone else. Turns out, the submitter's colorblindness is not genetic at all, but from a past head injury.
  • This woman was convinced that the color of an animal's pee was always the same color as the animal's fur, and as such called the local vet in a panic when her sister's brown dog's pee was yellow. The reaction of the sister in question implies that this wasn't the first time such a thing happened:
    Customer's sister: "This is why my sister was never allowed to have a pet growing up; she’s not the brightest."
  • This woman is desperate to get a nosejob... because she's pregnant, and she doesn't want the baby to inherit her natural nose.
• Ass Shove: This woman threatens this to a doctor that rather insensitively told her to 'PARTAY IT UP' for the next few days before she'll get surgery for her inviable pregnancy.
• Babies Make Everything Better: This therapist after being told by the submitter's husband about her depression, suggests he get her pregnant 'so she won't have time to worry about herself.'. Needless to say the husband is never going back to that therapist.
• Buffy Speak: "I put 'squeezy pressure thing'..." (he meant 'blood pressure band'). The very amused teacher accepts this as a correct response.
• But I Can't Be Pregnant!: An unfortunately common response to nurses from women who don't quite understand birth control. Equally unfortunately, however, some nurses tend to push the 'pregnancy' explanation on women who really can't be pregnant, such as lesbians, a post-hysterectomy trans man, and a girl who had her uterus removed as a kid.
  • This woman has a screaming panic attack when the doctor diagnoses her stomach cramps as labor contractions... with twins.
• Casual Danger Dialogue:
  • A guy walks into a clinic with a shattered arrow through his hand after an archery accident making wisecracks and puns the whole time.
  • This guy waited twenty minutes in the emergency room to tell the nurse that he'd been shot. The nurse thought he was joking until he showed the wound, because he was so calm about it. (He'd been driving with a loaded shotgun in the back and it misfired.)
• Casual Kink: This lady was advised by her friend to do the shopping with an activated love toy for a bit of thrill. She gets too much thrill.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: The optometrist's wife/receptionist refuses to wear her glasses. She loses her job and is facing divorce.
• Contrived Coincidence: In this story, a veterinary worker receives a phone call from a drunk man, explaining that it's his wedding anniversary, he and his wife are both drunk, their cat was fixed the previous day, and now her guts are hanging out. The doctor assumes it to be a minor issue, and has the tech start prepping the surgery. In the meantime, the submitter receives another phone call, this time from a drunk woman with the same story, and lets the doctor know that the cat is coming in twice. Fast forward half an hour, a taxi pulls up, and in comes a cat with the minor issue the vet suspected. Just as he's explaining the procedure, though, another taxi pulls up, and in comes another cat... whose guts are hanging out. Aside from the severity of the issue, everything between the two cats is the same, down to the way they both busted their stitches open.
• Cool Old Guy: After his attendant clumsily mentions how often she's mistaken for a man, this elder asks whether she'd rather be a man, then tells her that gender presentation doesn't matter as much as being a good person and he'll respect her however she wants to be respected.
• Could Say It, But...: This vet clinic invokes this trope to give a woman with limited income enough medicine for the eight sick puppies some jerk dumped in her driveway. Though they needed some help from another client to explain to the woman just what they were trying not to say.
• Crazy-Prepared: When Santa and the elves actually do all the prep work for a child's Christmas pet.
• Delayed Diagnosis: This doctor believes that the submitter has a learning disability. Turns out it was a rare form of epilepsy triggered by unfamiliar words, mainly ones from foreign languages.
• Depraved Dentist: After finding out their company dentist was overcharging for treatments, using inferior materials and tools, and deliberately inflicting pain on patients, a group of workers prepare to take legal action, only for the Covid-19 pandemic to get to him first.
• Determinator: Upon discovering that their case was being sent to a collections agency for a hospital bill they'd already paid in full (to a crooked staff member double-billing patients so he could pocket the money) and nobody was answering the phone to explain to them, this patient called the hospital and left angry rants in every employee's voicemail, a process they admit took them hours of calling every single option on the voicemail system.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • This assistant taking temperatures at the door to the doctor's office uses his thermometer on already-exposed areas of skin as the patients enter from outside, apparently failing to consider that the cold weather would have chilled those areas whether or not the patient is feverish.
  • The health insurance company in this story doesn't want to pay for the submitter's PET scan, giving the excuse that they hadn't had a (cheaper) CT scan to warrant it. Order a CT scan? No (cheaper) MRI scan. Order an MRI scan? No (cheaper) X-ray. In their attempt to save money on the PET scan, they end up spending five times the cost anyway for all of the scans combined, not to mention subjecting the submitter to much more radiation than was necessary. (On the plus side, the scan was negative and the submitter remains cancer-free.)
• Evil-Detecting Dog: In a sense. A customer's service dog suddenly starts indicating at a pregnant coworker; it turns out that the coworker's blood sugar level was critically low, even the doctor is amazed that she was still conscious, and if it had gone unnoticed it could easily have been fatal.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Numerous cases of doctors and nurses not reading the patient's medical record prior to or during an appointment and being shocked by a pre-existing condition that was on said record.
  • The patient is an amputee.
  • This doctor was too busy looking at his phone to notice a very obvious baby bump (as in, the poster is in her third trimester with triplets) and just assumes she must be there to get her birth control prescription renewed, because why else would a woman go to an OB/GYN?
  • This woman was so preoccupied with her son's heart surgery that she didn't notice her missed periods until she went into labor.
  • Two male doctors at a children's hospital are alarmed by the appearance of round solid shapes in a little girl's X-ray, assuming them to be tumors and discussing when and how to operate. A passing female technician immediately realizes that the round solids are... beads on the patient's hair tie, which she was wearing during the X-ray. One of the doctors admits his daughter wears the same style of hair tie, but still didn't realize the beads would show up on the film.
  • These nurses clearly need to check patients' charts more closely, as they somehow managed to mix up the pregnant, 25-year-old poster with the 102-year-old dementia patient in the bed opposite, and very nearly injected her with said dementia patient's medication (which could have had who-knows-what consequences for her pregnancy).
  • This nurse berates the submitter for asking them to retrieve an out-of-reach lunch menu, and tells the submitter to stand up and get it themselves. The submitter then reveals the reason they were in hospital - they'd just had a leg amputation, so no, they couldn't stand up.
  • This teen had experienced difficulty breathing and constant choking sensations for years before finally telling off the doctor who keeps dismissing it as "anxiety". They go to a new doctor, who takes one look at their throat and makes an appointment for the patient to get their massively enlarged tonsils removed. End of problem.
  • This doctor looks at the patient's blood test, diagnoses them with hyperthyroidism (overproductive thyroid gland), and recommends radiation or surgery. The patient asks if they should first reduce the hormone supplements they were already on for hypothyroidism (unproductive thyroid gland), prompting a Double Take.
  • The nurse for a tonsillectomy calls the patient's mother to verify that the patient has not eaten anything for the past twelve hours. The mother replies that the patient is a grown woman and no longer lives with her parents — the nurse assumed the patient for a tonsillectomy would be a child and mistakenly committed a major privacy violation.
  • In which thirty years of stomach problems, examined by multiple doctors, turns out to be lactose intolerance. When the submitter asked to be tested for that, their general doctor complained about fake diagnoses from the internet, raising the possibility they weren't looking for the condition because they didn't think it was real.
• Gallows Humor: This story is about a dentist who deliberatedly does a poor job as part of an insurance fraud, and then dies from Covid-19 before legal action against them could succeed. The story's last sentence tells the people who started the legal action now have a private joke which refers the Covid-19 pandemic as a "kill stealer."
• Gender-Blender Name: In this story, the submitter buys a hamster from a pet shop that incorrectly told them said hamster was a girl. They learn the hamster is really a boy after finding his gonads, but it's too late and the male hamster goes through life with the name Rose.
• Heal It with Booze:
  • This student nurse did their best to convince a friend not to "just pour some gin" over the gravel embedded in his hand.
  • When this fool was instructed to get alcohol for disinfecting the submitter's injury, he went to the corner liquor store for vodka instead of the corner drug store for rubbing alcohol.
• Hypocrite: This militant vegan thinks it's acceptable to preach at people for eating meat and dairy because she incorrectly thinks they're harmful to the human body, even though she's in rehab for a meth addiction.
• Incompetence, Inc.: In this story, the submitter, who has epilepsy, begins going to a new hospital close to her university, and nobody at this new hospital seems to know what they are doing. The Jerkass neurologist she sees thinks she is faking her seizures for attention and refers her to a psychiatric clinic, threatening to misdiagnose her with a Munchausen’s diagnosis if she doesn't do what he says. The submitter opts to just go back home to see her old neurologist instead afterward when she needs to, but then she has a seizure at work and has to go to the new hospital again. There, the neurologist from before prescribes her an anxiety medication that she is allergic to (and thinks she is just faking the allergy too), then abandons her in a dark room with nobody at the hospital going in to check in on her for hours and leaving her to wander around until she bumps into her roommate outside. It's only after the submitter has long since left that someone at the hospital calls the submitter's family (saying she had a "panic attack" instead of a seizure) and asks if they should start looking for her. The submitter's mother's response says what the reader is likely thinking by this point:^note On top of this, comments pointed out that for the hospital to think that the submitter's epilepsy was either anxiety, self-harm, or her just trying to get attention likely meant that either they didn't even look at her medical history, did and just straight-up ignored them, or were given falsified records by the neurologist and followed those to a T.
  Mother: What the f*** is wrong with you people?!
• Innate Night Vision: This man apparently believed this to be a standard trait of people with 20-20 vision, and was irate that his new glasses wouldn't allow him to see in the dark.
• Insane Troll Logic: This woman, whose husband was injured in a bike crash, and his insurance refuses to pay out after the hospital reports that he wasn't wearing a helmet. His wife blames the hospital for this, claiming that since the report wasn't required to state whether or not the hospital staff were wearing underwear, it also shouldn't be required to mention his lack of a helmet. She then storms out, screaming that the doctor isn't wearing any underwear.
• It's Probably Nothing: This doctor dismissed a female patient's complaints about pain for months, insisting that it was "just period cramps". The patient finally nags him into giving her a referral to a specialist, who correctly diagnoses her with a good-sized kidney stone in part by looking at the records the first doctor sent him. ^note In other words, the first doctor had evidence it wasn't "just period cramps", but ignored it because it didn't fit his preconceptions.
  I ended up having surgery, and passed it all with no problem. My family doctor never blamed pain on period cramps again.
  • This doctor doesn't believe the submitter's flu has become bronchitis until the submitter fails to walk across the room because of how bad their oxygenation is.
  • One from the patient's perspective here: they have chronic gastritis, so they ignored a persistent and increasingly painful stomachache for over a month, assuming it was more of the same until it was too painful to move and they finally called a nurse friend, who diagnosed it as appendicitis and rushed them to the hospital.
  • This patient's previous doctor dismissed abnormal enzyme levels on non-fasting blood tests on the basis that they tested normal after fasting. The new doctor is rightly concerned.
  • After a trip to an amusement park, including at least one of those flip-you-upside-down rides, this poster's brother mentions that his stomach is "kind of sore". Everyone assumes he was bruised by the safety harness, until nearly a week later when the poster catches him lying on the floor waiting for the painkillers ^note leftover from oral surgery earlier that year to kick in. His appendix had ruptured. (He made a full recovery.)
  • The nurse at a podiatrist ridicules an unusually young patient and their shoes (from an expensive medical specialty brand), and claims that they just have flat feet, so they need to get better shoes and quit wasting the doctor's time with pointless appointments. Upon actually seeing the doctor, she diagnoses the patient with severe plantar fasciitis (a condition where the connective tissue in the feet breaks down) in about five minutes, and approves of the specialty shoes. The next time the patient comes in, the nurse visibly prepares to mock them again, only for her face to fall upon seeing their documents confirming the diagnosis.
• Jerkass:
  • This doctor gives weight loss advice to the submitter that is seeing him regarding a skin problem on her foot. What makes it worse is that while the submitter is somewhat overweight, the doctor is visibly much more overweight.
  • Two caretakers at a nursing home abandon a patient whose stoma bag has ruptured, leaving only a trainee to calm the patient down, replace the bag, change her into clean clothes, and clean up the mess. Then they refuse to sign the training paperwork certifying the trainee in stoma care, because they didn't see the care being conducted (because they'd walked out). Fortunately, their manager is having none of it.
• Just for Pun: This nurse instructor tells the students that the bird flu needs a tweetment, and the swine flu an oinkment.
• Karma Houdini: The rival player who broke this submitter's arm in multiple places with an illegal cleat move was never punished because he's the coach's son.
• Killer Rabbit: Due to infection, a bite from a panicked housecat ends up more dangerous than one from a venomous snake. Also, the submitter's previous stay at that hospital was also from a cat bite!
• The Klutz:
  • This patient is so klutzy that their doctor, who happens to be their neighbor, greeted them by asking, "All right, what did you do this time?".
  • These two stories, with the series title "Wrap This Person In Bubble Wrap!", are both submitted by people who are extremely accident-prone, to the point where both stories have to be marked with a content warning for major injury.
• Lamarck Was Right: This woman evidently believes this, as she is desperate to get a nose job before her baby is born — as she doesn't want her to inherit her current nose.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The doctor (nicknamed "Dr Painful") in this story either refused to prescribe painkillers to his patients at all or (if somehow convinced the patient was in pain) seriously under-prescribed them. And then one day Dr Painful was admitted in his own hospital with a hernia. The doctor handling his case gave a strict "no painkillers at all" order, and every member of the staff gleefully enforced the order using Dr Painful's very own justifications for not giving painkillers every time he begged for some.
• Lethal Chef: This camp cook is more qualified to be a contestant on Worst Cooks in America than hold any even vaguely professional job, and only got the job with the summer camp because she faked her qualifications and the higher-ups failed, and continue to fail, to do their due diligence. Among other things, her food storage is nowhere near cold enough to store food safely; she stores raw meat above lettuce, therefore cross-contaminating, because the lettuce was going to be rinsed anyway; and most dangerously, she's an allergy denier whose solution to allergies is to sneak allergens into unsuspecting diners' food. Thankfully, this last thing results in her being arrested when two camp counselors are hospitalized because of her idiocy.
• Lethally Stupid:
  • This wife, after having a big fight with her husband, decides that it's a good idea to get her petty revenge by hiding his medications (as she cheerfully admits to the EMTs called in to treat him when he falls unconscious a week later).
  • This coworker inadvertently causes a food poisoning outbreak by thawing non-pre-cooked chicken wings in the fridge, cooking them in the microwave, and eating them on the break table. The latter two are stated to be done on a napkin instead of a plate, and comments theorize that they were probably thawed on that same napkin, leaving the microwave, table, and possibly the fridge contaminated. Fortunately, no one died from this (or at least, we're not told), but many commenters think that the coworker should have been fired rather than just reamed out, considering he couldn't seem to wrap his head around why he was creating such a health risk.
  • In a pile-up of lethal stupidity, a prison doctor, afraid that a violent new inmate will harm him, has said inmate transferred to a nearby psychiatric hospital, that has no security, and with only half an hour's warning. On the way, the police inform the inmate that the hospital, since it's also a withdrawal clinic, will give him the drugs he wants (which they can't, since he wants them in potentially lethal doses), and as soon as they've transferred him they immediately leave. Luckily the foresight of the hospital doctor means nobody gets harmed when the inmate throws his inevitable temper tantrum and destroys the examination room. Then, when the police are called back (because, again, they left this violent prisoner with no security), they try to blame the doctor for not just giving the inmate all the drugs he wanted.
• Lies to Children: This story shows the downside of that: a not-particularly-inquisitive lady believed one her parents told her about what 'fixing' a dog entails (it really means castrating the dog, but her parents told her it meant removing the dog's dewclaws/"thumbs") well into adulthood, and was only disabused of that notion when she complained to a vet that her dog wasn't fixed because he still had his "thumbs".
• Major Injury Underreaction:
  • This guy cut off his finger and is carrying it in a sandwich bag; he then has the gall to turn to the submitter and ask them if the receptionist is overreacting to his injury.
  • Here, the submitter falls on their wrist in a hurry to get to their class on time. On seeing them, the teacher sends them to the nurse, and it isn't until the nurse tells them that they realize their wrist is broken to the point where it's plainly visible.
• Mandatory Motherhood: Apparently believed by the doctors here, here and here, and a gynecologist's receptionist here.
  • Inverted by this doctor who tries to trick a pregnant diabetic into an abortion (and apparently succeeded with several others). It's portrayed as equally harmful and misogynistic.
• Million to One Chance: The nurse in this story swears that were the patient in a different age bracket, his symptoms would indicate scarlet fever from untreated strep throat, but at his age he should be able to recover normally. The doctor decides to order strep tests anyway, and they return positive.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: A K-9 officer was apparently shot during an arrest and rushed to the vet, crying and covered in blood... No, he wasn't. The blood and crying were from a broken toenail.
• Mistaken for Junkie: Some pharmacy employees just don't get that not everyone who picks up high-powered pain medication is there to abuse it, they really need it.
  • This pharmacy tech called the cops on a cancer patient who looked unhealthy and was getting some high powered pain meds because of cancer on the logic that the patient was getting the pills refilled on the same day every month.
  • In this case, the tech accuses anybody with a weekly prescription of being a junkie, is fired and banned after openly rejecting one patient's explanation that they have a shattered spine, and continues to harass patients at the doors until the police get involved.
  • In a non-pharmaceutical example, this horrible judgmental lady assumes the submitter is stoned because she's wearing sunglasses indoors, the fact that the submitter is coherent enough to point out that she can't smoke marijuana because the mere smell of it makes her unbearably dizzy notwithstanding, and then tries to bully her out of the restaurant. The submitter ends up having to lift her sunglasses, revealing that her pupils are dilated from an eye test, to stop the lady from harassing her.
  • This nurse will only give a patient with a large kidney stone Tylenol, and when the patient asked her to get some medication that would actually work, accused the patient of drug-seeking. The doctor who later comes in is baffled that the nurse apparently thinks the patient was faking a kidney stone of all things, despite it showing up in their imaging results, and personally makes sure the patient won't have to deal with her for the rest of the stay.
• Mistaken for Pregnant: The submitter's girlfriend in this story broke her finger while at work, so she goes to Accident and Emergency. Everybody she speaks to there is so hung up over her supposedly being pregnant that they completely ignore her actual injury until she shouts at them about it, and even after being discharged she gets a separate letter stating that having her period while pregnant is making her irritable.
• Morton's Fork: In this story, the doctor's office insisted that a patient had skipped an appointment without notice, which would get him thrown off the organ-transplant list. Unfortunately for them, they'd already billed his insurance for the tests run at that appointment and collected payment... so either the office staff is lying about the patient not showing up or they're committing insurance fraud, which would they prefer? What a surprise, the staff suddenly found the "misplaced" paperwork for that appointment.
• Must Have Caffeine: This lady tries to bully her attendant nurse into giving her coffee, despite being on a cardiac diet (no caffeine, extra sodium, or fat) until the nurse lays it out for her: "Do you want the coffee or do you want to live?!"
• Never Mess with Granny : "Here, take your baby. I have an ass to beat."
• Noodle Incident: A nurse from an immunization clinic shows up at the submitter's Health Department office asking if their emergency preparedness has any disposable booties. The submitter asks why the immunization clinic would need such and simply gets the response: "This is one of those 'you don't want to know' situations."
• no punctuation is funnier: This account of a pet insurance auto-email.
  ...in regards to your insurance payment for your pet Zombie.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Clearly, a veterinary nurse and a dentist are "all the same" because they both wear scrubs to work, so is this mouthwash brand any good?
• Skewed Priorities: This boyfriend is casually filming a video for YouTube and Instagram of the ambulance crew responding to his partner's medical episode, and at no point seems to realize she's in serious danger.^note Given that the submitter describes the woman's body as 'thin to the point bones are showing' while the boyfriend describes her as 'too fat', the comments speculate that some form of emotional abuse was at work.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Mentioned in passing as having backfired here, after bullying an X-ray tech results in an inaccurate X-ray:
  [(Doctor) stomps off to tattle to the head of Radiology, who reads him the riot act for being so rude to a tech]
  • Backfires again here, after a nurse submits an incorrect prescription (apparently a typo), throws a swearing fit at being called for a correction by the pharmacist, and tries to have him investigated for unprofessional behavior, which apparently ends with the nurse being fired.
• Surprise Pregnancy:
  • This mother doesn't realize she's pregnant until she goes into labor at seven months. Unusually for the trope, this one could well be justified, because the story revolves around the mother's son having to have open heart surgery; as pointed out by the comments, many typical pregnancy symptoms (missed periods, weight gain, nausea/vomiting, mood swings, etc.) can be easily mistaken for stress, which a parent in that situation would have in abundance.
  • This woman gets taken to the hospital for abdominal pain that keeps fluctuating and getting worse, but thinking that pregnancy isn't a possibility. The doctor performs an ultrasound and points out that she's in labor with twins, and she gives off a Big "NO!" before being transferred to the OB/GYN department, where the babies are born just fine.
• Tastes Like Purple: "PAIN IS F***ING SILVER!"
• They Just Don't Get It:
  • This rheumatologist continually gives the submitter advice about how to lose weight... when the submitter repeatedly states and shows in writing that they have tried to lose weight without success, and the doctor continually fails to understand that the submitter either is doing more than what the doctor asks or has already attempted it.
  • In a particularly horrific example that unfortunately ended badly, these possibly senile old idiots fail to recognise that their dog is not merely tired but suffering from heatstroke, despite the submitter's attempts to help the poor dog and other concerned customers' attempts to alert them to his condition, until it's too late. Both the submitter and the commenters were horrified that someone could be that oblivious to their pet's condition.
  • The patient is a vegetarian with a milk allergy, so they cannot reduce consumption of red meat and dairy: they already don't eat either!
    Patient: Could you please help me to understand how to reduce meat and dairy when I haven’t eaten any meat in over twenty years and I haven’t eaten dairy in over ten?
    Medical Professional: I think you should arrange an appointment with your doctor... as you aren’t listening to my advice.
    • Similarly, two separate dietitians (and one colleague) cannot grasp that their patient cannot drink less alcohol because they already don't drink any.
  • This patient tells the dietitian at least six times that they're severely allergic to nuts. The dietitian continues to insist that the patient needs to eat a minimum of 60 grams/2.1 ounces of nuts every day to stabilize their blood sugar levels, and refuses to suggest any other food item that might help with blood sugar without killing the patient.
  • The pediatrician in this story is so hung up on his belief that rural clients must be unwashed, uneducated, trash folk that he assumed a child's rash was ringworm (from visual evaluation only, without performing the required tests), and when it returned, that the parents were lying about how they'd cleaned everything, rather than that his diagnosis was wrong. After he's investigated and loses his license for several other bigotry-based misdiagnoses, his successor immediately diagnoses the child with chronic eczema, which was being repeatedly irritated by the parents' cleaning detergent.
  • The submitter of this story assumes this is the case with a woman who won't wear a face mask in the pharmacy. It takes a few tries to realize the prescription she's trying to get filled is for a specialty painkiller; her face is too badly inflamed to wear the mask, and they're the one not getting it!
  • The nurse in this story is apparently unable to comprehend that just because the patient possesses a uterus does not mean it must automatically be the cause of all her medical issues. She starts by asking if she's pregnant, while eyeing her (presumably male) partner; when the patient explains that she's on her period, the nurse suggests this might be the cause of her problem. No matter how many times the increasingly annoyed patient tries to explain that she's in with a broken finger, the nurse seems to be convinced that it's a pregnancy issue, until she finally storms off muttering about problem patients. After another 20 minutes the couple are visited by another nurse, who is surprised to see them as the first one had already issued a discharge for her — diagnosing her with period-related pregnancy problems which were making her irritable. The by-now furious patient yells that her finger is broken, and finally gets it treated — but she ends up receiving two discharge letters, one for her finger and one for the non-existent pregnancy issue.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • This person adamantly refuses to tell their pharmacist what other medications they are taking before getting allergy medicine, a major no-no in pharmacy. Although the submitter refuses to give them the medicine unless the customer tells them what other meds they are taking, it's later revealed that the pharmacy's previous pharmacist previously caved and gave the customer the medicine anyway after the customer raised a fuss, whereupon the customer suffered a bad reaction to the medicine after taking them along with codeine as he was leaving the pharmacy and got in a car accident as a result.
  • This man, who is very allergic to shellfish, has to be rescued by a hotel security guard and paramedics when he has a severe reaction. It turns out that he'd just eaten a big seafood dinner because he thought "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" meant it didn't count.
• Worst Aid:
  • Fortunately averted in this story. When the poster fainted in an amusement park line, he woke up to find his fiancée trying to stop a "nurse" from performing CPR on him. Even after the poster sat up and told the bystander he was all right, she continued to insist he was experiencing a heart attack and had to let her treat him. Security finally had to drag the woman off, still insisting that "I know what’s best for you! I’m a nurse!"
  • Another thankful aversion here, where the then eleven-year-old OP suffers burns from a gas stove, and her mother's friend keeps on insisting that butter should be applied to the burn — an old folk remedy that, in reality, does more harm than good, as it traps in heat (potentially causing further damage) and can also increase the risk of infection. The mother ignores this, however, and takes her to hospital. She later tells the doctor what her friend suggested; the doctor, shocked at this, gives her a note for her friend explaining exactly why you shouldn't use butter.
  • This doctor claims it's not his job to read the patient's chart before injecting them with a known allergen!
• You Keep Using That Word:
  • Literally the title here. The rude patient in this submission continually calls other people "rude" for "offenses" such as going before her (when their corresponding number is called) and calling her out when the fact that they are going by numerical order is explained. As the submitter notes in the last line, "I really don’t think the rude patient understood the meaning of the word rude."
  • Here, the OP notices that one of the university's zoology lab, where research on amphibians is done, has a Post-It note with the number of a free clinic that does STI testing on it. The PhD student in attendance theorises that people just google "Herpetology" without knowing what it means and call the first number that pops up.
  • This woman is frustrated that she can't order egg dishes in the hospital because she described herself as allergic to egg yolks... because she finds them disgusting. What do you mean, that's not what "allergic" means?
• Your Tomcat Is Pregnant: Inverted: A new hamster owner finds a lump on the pet's backside and, fearing a tumor, takes her to the vet. It turns out to be "her" gonads.

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