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Not Always Healthy
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Not Always Healthy is a sister sitenote  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.

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Not Always Healthy contains examples of:

    A-J 
  • Abusive Parents:
  • Accidental Misnaming: In "Puff! And You Have A Doctorate", the submitter has to convince the vet's receptionist that she is "Dr. Smith" and her cat is "Puffles," and not the other way around.
  • 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 "A Sudden Jab Of Terror" 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!!"
  • Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: This mother mistakes a hospital patient for staff and demands to know why the staff (who are busy with a car crash victim's cardiac arrest) aren't making a big enough deal of her daughter's stomachache, openly admitting that she doesn't care about the crash victim. The submitter notices the daughter's reaction to her mother's behaviour:note 
    The daughter seems to be about thirteen years old. She is covering her face with her hands and looking a bit like she wishes the floor would swallow her up.
  • 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 
    • 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 condition in question only requires both parents to be carriers, which can be true even if they don't manifest the condition, not to mention it can also be caused by a head injury, which the submitter has a history of.
    • 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.
    • This nut:
      Customer: Dogs have lungs?!
    • “…Ma’am. You’ve called a neurology office. [Doctor] doesn’t treat seizures.”
  • Artistic License – History: While arguing with a security guard, this anti-masker (who's heavily implied to be a Donald Trump supporter) claims that Barack Obama (who was sworn in January of 2009) was going golfing while victims of Hurricane Katrina (which happened in August of 2005) suffered and 9/11 (in 2001) happened.
  • Ask a Stupid Question...: This medical lab assistant's response to a patient expecting them to be able to identify their blood type just by looking at a sample.
    Lab assistant: Well, it isn’t green, so we can rule out Vulcan.
  • 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.
    • This hospital has an entire book of x-ray records specifically for people who claim they fell and something went up their ass far enough that they needed to go to hospital. The "L" section is mostly lightbulbs. With in their first month, the submitter has to add a Funko Pop to The Book.
    • In "No Longer Golden... Or Delicious", a surgeon had just finished surgery to remove a whole apple from the patient's bowels.
      Poster: Wow, did he like, not chew or something?
      Surgeon: *Long stare.* “It didn’t enter via the mouth, [Poster].
  • Assurance Backfire: "These Responses Aren't Coming Out Of Left Field" shows that when somebody breaks their arm, it's generally not much consolation to tell them "at least it's your left arm" when they're left-handed.
  • Atomic F-Bomb: One patient belts out one of these after a three-year-old boy, upon realizing that he'll be getting a shot as well as his sibling, throws a tantrum and kicks her in the arm she just had two shots in. (To her credit, she waits until the kid's out of the room first.)
  • 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 vows never to so much as smell that therapist again.
  • Bad People Abuse Animals:
    • This husky's owner leaves her with her brother while she moves to another town and gets set up. When she receives the dog six months later, she finds that despite her leaving her brother money for grooming, the husky has been horribly neglected, being covered head-to-toe in matted fur, and with some fur clumsily shaved off. Suffice to say, the dog's owner, the vet she takes her to, and her old groomer are all furious when they find out what's happened.
    • "From Dastardly Divorce Dealings To A Meow-velous Mystery" mixes this trope with Divorce Assets Conflict — a woman dumps two healthy cats at a vet clinic to be euthanized because she might not get them in the divorce, and she doesn't want her soon-to-be-ex-husband to possibly be happy with his cats. The vet is unable to track down the ex-husband, but does manage to get the cats re-homed rather than killed.
      She, of course, didn’t love them. They were objects to dispose of, just to hurt her ex.
  • Belief Makes You Stupid:
    • Compared to most Not Always examples, this senior living community resident at least has the excuse that she's suffering from dementia, but it's still concerning that she's chasing an attendant threatening to literally beat him up with a crucifix.
    • This poster had to switch doctors due to an insurance change, and at the first appointment the doctor tells them the best medicine is simply to pray to God "because He knows what’s wrong with you better than I, and He can heal you better than anything I can do." Guess who switched doctors again?
  • Beware of Vicious Dog: This Chow Chow bites a vet tech when the woman walks over to get the dog's owner to sign some papers, and three other employees get bit while trying to get the dog to let go. The Chow's owner is ordered to pay a massive fine for the incident (and for attempting to sue the hospital for attacking her dog), and warned that if the dog bit anyone again, it'd be put down.
  • Big Brother Bully: This hotheaded hospital patient's older brother visits him just to tell him that he's going to be breaking his stuff at home.
  • Buffy Speak:
  • 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, virgins (or people who've been celibate for longer than a human gestation period), 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 "Drunk Up To Their Guts", 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; the submitter presumes it's the man's wife and that he'd failed to tell her he called due to how drunk he was, 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.
    • This poster's newborn son went straight to neonatal intensive care after the birth. When a tech came in to take an ultrasound of the boy's brain, she was very apologetic about not being able to tell the poster anything about his son's condition ... and then loudly pointed out to her trainee that the scan was showing "a textbook example" of normal formation. (And the kid is now doing fine.)
  • 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.
    • A four-year-old boy walked over a kilometer barefoot in the pouring rain to get help for his injured parents after a car crash.
  • 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 "Congratulations On The (Frustrating, Long-Awaited) All-Clear!" 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? Not without a (cheaper) MRI scan. Order an MRI scan? Not without a (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.)
  • The Ditz:
    • When this genius's wife tells him that if he kept sitting around drinking beer and watching soccer, his brain would shut down. Later, when he gets a crick in his neck, he thinks his brain has partially shut down, and in a panic, he calls 112.note  Over the phone, the submitter tells him how to deal with the crick, but he asks if it would really be possible for his brain to shut down from watching soccer and drinking beer. The submitter tries to explain that technically drinking alcohol to excess can kill brain cells, but the caller cuts them off mid-sentence, thinking they're agreeing with his wife, and swears off booze before abruptly hanging up.
    • This woman is Super Gullible to the point where advice from Reddit convinces her that the best way to find out if her dog is pregnant is to hold the dog on her belly and pee on a pregnancy test – not the dog's pee, her pee. Later, she remarks that she's looking for a "holistic abortion center" that she also read about online.
      The vet who examined the dog […] told me after the woman had left that she had never met anyone so out of touch with reality.
    • This woman not only misses clear signs that she's pregnant, but when it turns out this is the product of one of several one-night stands with a number of Brazilian construction workers, she asks if this means the baby will come out speaking Spanish.
      After a long pause, and her sister staring at the ceiling, I told her:
      Submitter: No, because they speak Portuguese in Brazil.
  • Dr. Jerk:
    • This doctor's reaction to botching an injection is to shout at the crying, child submitter. When a nurse comes to see the commotion, he "all but slams" the needle into the nurse's hand and storms off, telling her to deal with the "spoiled brat" submitter. He would later be fired for being too rough with patients – one of whom nearly died under his watch.
      Doctor: What the h*** was that for?! You’re ten! Grow up!
    • This doctor accuses the submitter of being medication-seeking, then withholds some medication from them for being "too fat" when the submitter only weighs 157 pounds, then when the submitter points this out, says they can't have the medication because they're underweight. He then puts the submitter on a new medication and threatens to stop treating them if they don't take it. The submitter's health winds up declining due to not getting the medications they need, and they have to use an old address to re-enroll in their old county to be rid of him.
    • This doctor tries to take the submitter off their antidepressants, even though the submitter can't function without them and cutting them in the past led to a suicide attempt, and claims that losing weight will solve the submitter's depression, even though they'd been depressed while anorexic. The submitter demands to see another doctor, leading the doctor to stomp off, yelling about uncooperative patients. The senior practice doctor helps the submitter file a report against the first one.
    • This doctor seems unable to send a state-required form in correctly, at one point, throwing it into the trash. At one point, a nurse tries to "help" by forging the doctor's signature. The submitter reports the doctor to the medical board, which triggers an investigation into the doctor and his department. In response, the doctor does the sensible thing and puts up signs saying “If you are mean to me, I will be mean to you.” By the end of the story, most people find it easier to go to another neurologist forty minutes away, and the department the doctor works in has developed a High Turnover Rate.
  • 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 so critically low that even the doctor is amazed that she was still conscious, and if it had gone unnoticed it could easily have been fatal. (Detecting blood sugar levels is what the service dog was trained for, as shown by the fact that he has specific actions he uses to cue his owner to what he's noticing, but it's still pretty impressive that he was aware enough to detect the problem on a stranger at a distance.)
  • Eye Scream: This submitter, a veterinary technician, got a 1x3 cm chunk clawed out of their cornea by an overly rambunctious puppy, which they describe as one of the most painful injuries they've ever taken.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Now has its own page!
  • Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: This mother asks that a three-legged dog be removed from the room because it makes her uncomfortable, even after being told that the dog was being brought to the hospital to help cheer up a boy who'd had his leg amputated.
    Mother: Yes, I asked the nurses to remove him, too, but they said no.
    I just give the mother a look.
    Mother: They looked at me like that, too! Honestly, is it too much to ask for a little sympathy? Missing legs freak me out!
  • First-Person Smartass: The narration in "When The Mama Bear Instinct Overrides Rational Thought", during this exchange between a mother who's mistaken the submitter (in the ER for an eye injury) for a doctor:
    Submitter: Did you not see the man come in that got hit by a car?
    Mother: Is he my daughter? No? Then why would I care? What's wrong with your face? Quit winking at me!
    Just struggling to see over here, my bad.
  • Gallows Humor: "A Most Unfulfilling Dentist" is about a dentist who deliberately did a poor job as part of an insurance fraud, and then died from COVID-19 before legal action against him could succeed. The story's last sentence says that the people who started the legal action now have an In-Joke calling the COVID-19 pandemic a "Kill Stealer."
  • Gassy Scare: This poster experienced a full day of severe abdominal pain, and their parents took them to the emergency room. After several tests, the doctor gave them muscle relaxers for tension ... and the poster promptly released all the trapped gas from their digestive tract.
    My parents now refer to the incident as the $500 fart.
  • Gender-Blender Name: In "Man, What A Mistake!", 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.
  • Groin Attack: In "I'm Rarely Speechless, But... DANG", an offscreen patient learns why you listen when the nurses ask you to remove all your piercings. The poster, who was sitting in the hospital waiting room, describes the result as "an unearthly scream [...] so loud it put horror movies to shame." A nurse explains it thusly:
    Nurse: MRI. Prince. Albert.
  • 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.
  • Heteronormative Crusader: This nurse nearly botches a patient's IV after seeing that she's married to a woman. The best case scenario is that she was "just" tuning the patient out and not listening to her, as the alternative is active sabotage. Either way, the nurse's license was put on probation.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: This healthcare boss orders forty boxes of dialysate bags through express delivery despite being told by the submitter that only eight are needed through express and it would be cheaper to get the other thirty-two regular. It turns out the expense severely impacted the budget, which costs the boss her bonus.
  • 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 "Some People Shouldn't Be Allowed To Be Doctors", 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 Dr. Jerk 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 
    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.
  • Innocently Insensitive: The submitter of "At Least You Have Two Feet To Put In There" is prone to putting their foot in their mouth. In the story, they prove this by explaining that their girlfriend (who's standing there) has a grandfather who's doing poorly and "is pretty much on his last leg." The girlfriend winds up running out crying as the submitter remembers too late that their girlfriend's grandfather had recently had his leg amputated.
  • 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.
    • "Dogs don't bite me; I'm vegan!"
    • This crank assumes that because her doctor's office isn't taking walk-ins that day, then the receptionist – who hasn't even been given her name – is trying to make her suffer.
  • Instantly Proven Wrong: The submitter in "Appendix A: It Gets Worse" is feeling miserable due to appendicitis and the lousy sensation during the surgical procedure — and the submitter is need of urination to boot. The submitter claims “It can’t get any worse”... right before a nurse enters the room and makes an announcement that turns the situation From Bad to Worse.
    Nurse: Time for your suppository.
  • I Reject Your Reality: This soccer player's mother, on seeing her daughter accidentally break the submitter's ankle, feels that her daughter shouldn't have been red-carded and accuses the submitter of doing it on purpose to make her daughter look bad (when even her daughter agrees she was at fault and is mostly just upset that she hurt someone), then kicks the submitter's broken ankle while she's lying helpless on the ground (and possibly breaking the ankle in another place) to "prove" that she's faking it. A coach has to prevent the submitter's mother from attacking her. Even when the police arrive, the other player's mother continues to yell that the submitter and her mother should both be arrested for "defamation." Instead, she's arrested for assault and subsequently banned from future games.
    Paramedic: You can’t help stupid, I guess.
  • 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 
      (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 in "“Ignore It Until It Goes Away” Doesn't Work With Everything": 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  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: Now has its own page.
    K-Y 
  • Karma Houdini Warranty: The rival player who broke this submitter's arm in multiple places with an illegal cleat move was never officially punished because he's the coach's son… until someone else got sick of him cleating other people and cleats him right back.
  • 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.
    • Another "Wrap This Person In Bubble Wrap" story, as she has a lot of broken bones. But of note is that she gets herself injured twice… in the hospital.
  • 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.
    • Downplayed, but in "Sex Education Failed Her In A Brazillian Ways", a clueless pregnant woman asks a doctor if her baby will be born speaking Spanish if the father was Brazilian.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: Now has its own page.
  • 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.
    • This cat owner only feeds his cat twice a week because he thought that's how often wild cats ate in the wild. Thankfully, after the submitter sets him right, he sets him up on a better feeding schedule.
    • This anti-vaxxer sheep farmer refuses to vaccinate his sheep against foot-and-mouth disease, saying that he doesn't need to "vaccinate for kanker sores," and says all he needs to do is rub some herbal ointments on the sores. He even tries to get the submitter – a veterinarian administering the regionally mandated vaccinations – to try and falsify the vaccination documentation for him. Naturally he blames the vet when his sheep start getting sick and dying some months later.
  • Lies to Children: "Opposable Definitions" shows the downside of this: 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.
    • In "The Human Body Is A Shocking Wonder, 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.
    • This cat, after being attacked by a dog.
      Vet: That… is a very weird cat. He should be freaking out because he has a huge hole in his side.
    • This submitter's mother glancingly cut her finger with a chainsaw, causing it to bleed profusely, and the hospital receptionist taking her call assumes from her calm tone that it's not that serious until the submitter interjects with the nature of the injury. (Thankfully, no permanent damage was done to the finger aside from a nasty scar.)
    • This farmer has an accident with his machinery that rips his arm off. He then proceeds to calmly drive (a car with a manual transmission) 20 miles to a naval hospital. The doctors are all amazed that he didn't pass out from the blood loss.
  • Mandatory Motherhood: Apparently believed by the doctors in "IOU One IUD, Part 2", "All Doctors To Procreation Stations" and "Not At Your Cervix", and a gynecologist's receptionist in "Time To Terminate Your Relationship With This Receptionist".
    • 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.
    • When this older mother went in for a post-birth checkup, the nurse tried to shame her for asking about birth control options because "most women your age would love to be pregnant." The patient pointed out that this was a post-birth checkup for her fourth child, and she wanted to talk to a doctor about birth control.
  • Mathematician's Answer: This poster was going over their medical history due to an insurance change. Part of that history was hospitalization for a stroke and resulting dysarthria (difficulty in speaking).
    Agent: When were you discharged [from hospital]?
    Poster: When I could pronounce it.
  • Million to One Chance:
    • The nurse in "Scarlet Fever Once In An Azure Moon" 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.
    • A paramedic arrives at a rolled SUV and instantly fears the worst; hysterical mother, unresponsive father, and two children on board who aren't making any noise. In short order it's discovered that the mother's injuries are superficial, the father is just unconscious, one of the children (a baby) is asleep safely strapped into their baby seat and even the dog is alright, but a four-year-old is completely missing... until they arrive shortly afterwards brought by a member of the public, whereupon it turns out the kid made it through the accident unharmed and then walked a kilometer in bare feet to find help. The whole family are alive and the worst injury was the father's broken arm. It's even pointed out how lucky the four-year-old was; if they'd turned in the other direction on the main road, there was nothing for 60 kilometers.
  • 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 Disease: This vet finds a firm mass in a ferret's abdomen and believes it may be a tumor or something similar, only to be baffled when nothing shows up on an ultrasound. The truth is finally revealed when, following the scan, the ferret makes his way to the sink and begins relieving himself; the "tumor" was just a very full bladder, and the ferret was so well-trained that he'd continued to hold it through the entire exam despite repeatedly having pressure put on it. Since it was their mistake, the vet doesn't charge the owner for the scan.
  • 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 "Who Prescribed Some Madness?", 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.
    • This patient had to go to the ER because the doctor refused to believe their pain could possibly be an eight, and even then the pharmacy tech isn't sure about giving Tylenol to "someone ... in your state" (that being the state of someone who spent all night at the ER arguing about how much pain they were in), will only give them the antibiotics, and lies about the pharmacist not being available. When they collect their second dose of antibiotics, smartly dressed for work, the same tech is perfectly friendly until she recognises the name, and even then doesn't say anything. It makes that much difference.
  • Mistaken for Pregnant: The submitter's girlfriend in "Get Your Nose Out Of My Uterus!" 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.
  • Mondegreen Gag: In "He Has A Real Heart For Medicine", a nurse brings in satin hearts for their coworkers to pin to their shirts for Valentine's Day, with a doctor receiving the largest heart. Hilarity Ensues when a family member of the doctor later arrives asking for him, and a coworker directs them to him while describing him as "the one with the big heart on".
    That is NOT what the patient heard.
  • Morton's Fork: In "The Insurance Is The Assurance", 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.
  • MRS Degree: This sexist doctor is surprised that the submitter isn't interested in going back to college and tells her that the best thing for her anxiety would be to go back to college, lose weight, and find a good husband. Suffice to say, that's the last time the submitter sees that doctor.
  • Mundane Made Awesome: For one patient, getting a bone graft with cadaver bone = becoming part zombie.
  • 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?!"
  • My Beloved Smother: This patient's mother is very opinionated about modern medicine and pesters hospital staff over the littlest details, even after her son is able to come to appointments by himself.
    Mother: And I read the ER doctor’s note from when he was admitted for his [condition], and it says, ‘Patient’s care delayed due to extensive conversation with the mother.’ WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!
  • Never Mess with Granny: "Here, take your baby. I have an ass to beat."
  • Never My Fault: In "YOU'RE Feeling Attacked Right Now?!" a woman's Chow Chow, without provocation, violently attacks a vet tech (who had just calmly walked up to the dog's owner with a clipboard for the owner to sign some papers) with enough force to drag the poor woman onto the floor (and end up hospitalizing the tech afterward) and attacks the vet workers trying to separate the angry dog from her as well. The dog's owner spends the whole time not being concerned about the tech at all and begins screaming about the vet owners attacking the dog, and then blames the tech for walking up to the dog in the first place. Then she sues the veterinarian office for animal abuse and emotional distress. The vets don't take the suit lying down and the woman ends up having to pay a huge settlement to them instead and gets in enormous trouble with Animal Control over the aggressive dog.
  • Noodle Implements: In "Uh... What?", a patient with a gash on his forehead walks up to the intake desk of an ER wearing a raccoon onesie/hoodie, an eyepatch with the word "cheese" on it four times, one of his hands covered in blue ink, and a pink accordion on a strap slung around his shoulder.
  • 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.
    Email: Please call us on [number] or email us quoting [policy number] 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?
  • Now You Tell Me?: In "Don't Stay Mum On The Medical History", the submitter has a severe allergic reaction to a medication after surgery. Afterwards, they're talking about it with their mother, and their mother quite casually mentions that when the submitter was born, they nearly died because their mother had been given that same medication while she was in labour with them. The submitter is not happy to learn this.
    That would have been good to know much earlier, rather than hearing it for the first time when I was forty-six!
  • Obstructive Bureaucrat: This doctor's office gives the submitter's aunt the runaround, saying that the neurologist can't help with her son's seizures and rage episodes because he needs to see a psychologist first. The aunt points out that her son is nonverbal, so therapy won't help, but the receptionist is unswayed. The psychologist they refer them to is just as baffled by the neurologist's office's decision, and explained the aunt's points to the neurologist's office. The aunt wound up seeing a different neurologist, but wound up seeing the psychologist anyway – for her stress.
  • Pun: This nurse instructor tells the students that the bird flu needs a tweetment, and the swine flu an oinkment.
  • Quack Doctor: This dietitian supposedly has an Asyra machinenote  that can "measure your bioenergy field to establish what you can and can’t tolerate in your diet" and doesn't require electrodes to be plugged in. She also claims that the submitter may have allergic differences between American and British soy milk, and that radon gas would poison them less than carrots. The submitter and their mother have to hold in their laughter until they leave. They try complaining to the hospital, but nothing is done about the quack.
  • Reading the Stage Directions Out Loud: Something similar in "Finally, Someone With A Dose Of Sense": When a pharmacy phones a vet to double-check the prescription for one dog, as they always do, the new receptionist is told to read out the answers they've been giving for the past four years, and rattles them off as a monologue rather than waiting for the questions. This actually works out in the vet's favour, because the pharmacy finally realises they've been asking the same questions every time, and they can just put a note in the file that the dosage is correct.
  • Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: This cat owner.
    What I don’t understand is brazenly spending several thousand dollars on fancy cats, and then seeming completely unprepared for the (relatively much lower!) cost of routine medical care.
  • Scunthorpe Problem: This hospital's web filters run into it (for example, the British Urological Society's website is blanked out due to "sexual connotations"). The submitter had to get permission from the hospital to waive the filters for websites to research terms mentioned in official documents.
  • Skewed Priorities: Now has its own page.
  • Smug Snake: This possibly abusive older brother taunts his younger brother – currently in hospital – that he's going to break his stuff while he's out. The submitter notes that the brother has "a grin that just begged to be wiped with a fist to the teeth."
  • Summon Bigger Fish:
  • Super Gullible: This woman takes way too much advice from online randos. She was apparently told by a "vet" on Reddit that the best way to tell if a dog is pregnant is to hold the dog on your stomach and then pee on the pregnancy test – not the dog's pee, your pee. After the test turned out positive and an actual vet's receptionist set her straight, she went looking for a "holistic abortion center" that she also read about online.
  • 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.
  • Sustained Misunderstanding: This (probably tired and overworked) nurse, on asking a patient if they smoke anything other than cigarettes, takes the joking reply — "Only briskets" — to be a drug term, and the patient's attempts to explain don't help, as the nurse assumes "meat", "beef" and "cow" to be drug slang as well. Eventually the patient asks to start over and states, "I do not take any drugs that are not prescribed to me" — which the nurse assumes means they have a prescription drug habit.
  • Tastes Like Purple: "PAIN IS F***ING SILVER!"
  • Technologically Blind Elders:
    • This old woman is incapable of understanding how to use a hospital's electronic check-in system. She's unable to follow instructions, thinking that her library card counts as valid ID. Eventually, she gives up, kicks the machine, and storms off, vowing never to set foot in the hospital again.
    • This story is titled "The Ultimate Technophobe" as it features an old woman who refuses to so much as touch computers - the hospital's sign-in kiosk included.
      Woman: It’s hard enough to put a card in the grocery store machine. Now you’re making me do it here?
  • They Just Don't Get It: Can be seen on their own page.
  • Threat Backfire: How this dentist deals with a Bratty Half-Pint that refuses to cooperate and tries to blackmail him with his clothes. The dentist tells him to do it, and the kid strips naked; undeterred, the dentist proceeds to work on him while instructing his assistant to take the kid's clothes away for the day. A Humiliation Conga ensues as the dentist sends the kid out without his clothes, his mother (normally an Pushover Parent when he does it to her) marches him all the way to the car, and she makes him spend all day naked while being teased by his siblings. From then on, he behaved himself at the dentist and never blackmailed anyone with his clothes again.
  • 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.
    • This woman, dubbed Cindy, apparently had a stroke, but her husband Steve drives her to the hospital instead of calling an ambulance. Why? Because Cindy wanted to stop and pick up a burger from McDonald's on the way there.
    • This homeowner's garage is on fire, and they're asked if there's anything dangerous in there. They say no, and so the firefighters head in... only for the four gas cylinders stored in the garage to explode a few minutes later. When questioned on why they didn't mention those, they reply that they keep gas under the barbecue, and that's perfectly safe, so they assumed it was fine.
      [The firefighters] explained to him the difference in temperature between a barbecue fire and a garage being on fire.
  • The Trope Formerly Known as X: This family all agree that their dog no longer has her shelter name of Princess, but they all have a different name for her, and in the ensuing argument they come up with three more. So the vet's assistant notes the name as "The Dog Formerly Known as Princess".
  • Worst Aid:
    • Fortunately averted in "Infarction Infraction". 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 in "You'd Butter Forget Those Old Wives' Tales", 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!
    • This doctor says he'll stick in the needle on the count of three… then jabs it in on the count of two, before the submitter (then a needle-phobic child) is prepared, resulting in the submitter jerking back, causing their arm to bleed. The doctor then tells the submitter to "grow up" and calls them a "spoiled brat." It would turn out that this was not an isolated incident, as he would be fired for being too rough with his patients, one of which nearly died under his "care."
  • You Keep Using That Word:
    • The Trope Naming quote is the title of this story. A rude patient 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."
    • In "Derpy With The Herpy", 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: 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, and the hamster goes through life with the name "Rose".

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