What's the worst surprise injury you've seen at a medical checkup?

I'm an x-ray tech. Had a patient walk into the urgent care for hip x-rays. Her order said

it was for hip pain, which is pretty routine. Turns out she had walked in on not one, but two,

fractured hips. Can't even freaking imagine how painful that must have been. Guy comes up to the

triage window with his arms over his head, palms of his hands pressed against his ears.

Um, I'm in tremendous pain, he says when asked what's wrong, x-rayed him and found he'd broken his

neck. He had been walking around with that for three days.

My brother once jumped on the front of my white car, grabbing the front pillars with his hands.

I closed the door and caught his finger, which he pulled out quickly, as you do, but there was

a tiny chip of paint that had come off the car and got lodged under the skin somehow. He must

have spent a week or so chewing on it to try to get the paint out, but it wasn't working, so he went to a doctor to see if he could help. After checking it out, the doctor tells him, uh, the reason you can't get that out is because it's your bone. Apparently, when I shut the door on his finger, I'd broken the tip of his pinky enough so that he could see the bone through the skin and had spent the next few days trying to pull his own

finger bone out with his teeth.

I was a triage nurse in the ER when a patient calmly walked up and reported a complaint

of pain in his side.

He failed to mention the blood and the handle of the butcher knife sticking out at the

left lower quadrant of his abdomen. He was a homeless schizophrenic who had been stabbed and had

calmly walked into the ER and waited his turn to be seen. I mean, honestly, I'm just glad he came in at

all. We also get a lot of people who come in for other things, like a sore throat or a cough, and when

doing a skin assessment, we find a huge pressure ulcer or gangrenous feet. I've twice had patients' toes

come off when removing their socks. Neither time had they come to the ER for that issue.

A patient who had a routine check-up at his ophthalmologist, or eye doctor, who found a small

spot in his retina. When referred to a

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