Doctors And Nurses Are Sharing The Terrifying Things They Witnessed In Hospitals, And I Guess "Grey's Anatomy" Isn't So Far Off After All
Maybe this is weird, but I've always been fascinated by hospitals and emergency rooms. It's such high-stakes work that I could never do it — but it's wildly interesting to hear about. So when tons of nurses, doctors, and surgeons answered, "What’s the craziest thing you have seen at a hospital?" and similar questions over on Quora, I was super invested in the replies. Here are 31 wild experiences that sound straight out of Grey's Anatomy.
NOTE: The stories ahead can be disturbing and gruesome.
1."I've had many terrifying experiences as an ER/Trauma nurse. One of the most terrifying things that happened in our ER several years ago was a patient that we had taken care of who was discharged to go home. He had been seen for evaluation and was deemed fit to leave the hospital. Well, apparently, this man decided he wasn't satisfied with our care. He went home, got his pickup, and returned to the hospital. He had decided to use his pickup as a weapon and drove INTO the ER waiting area, then proceeded to smash up everything he could before taking off down the street. Of course, police caught up with him just a short distance away from the hospital and hauled him off to jail. Fortunately, no one was injured, including the idiot driver."
—Sharon A., Quora
2."I took care of a 12-year-old girl WHO WAS SHOT while in the Emergency Room. She was with her friend — another 12-year-old girl — and her friend's mother. The woman came to the ER to get a doctor to prescribe her some medicines she routinely took but were prescribed by a doctor in her home state (they were on vacation). While waiting to see the doctor in the Emergency Suite, she suddenly sat her oversized purse with handles down on the tile flooring. BANG. Several nurses and staff rushed in to see what had happened without thinking of personal danger. When the woman slammed the purse down on the floor, the force was enough to cause the gun in her purse to fire a bullet right through the purse and the young girl's upper thigh."
"It was the cleanest GSW (Gun Shot Wound, in ER talk) I ever saw in the ER. The young girl was surprisingly calm. She was in emotional shock at the reality of the situation and did not realize its possible fatal outcome.
She was admitted for a 23-hour observation after a sterile cleaning and irrigation of the wound, which again had surprisingly minimal bleed loss after about 10 or 15 minutes.
Side Note: I bet that was one tough telephone call to make to the mother of the child who was placed in your care. 'Hello, I just called to say I shot your daughter.'"
—Steven L. G, Quora
3."There was a murder of a patient by her estranged husband in her room at a hospital where my mother was being treated. He used a screwdriver to stab her to death. I didn't see the murder, but people were screaming on the PA system, which struck me as really odd at the time because you assume patients are coding all the time at a large hospital. Then I googled 'Code Silver.' Be concerned if you ever hear that at a hospital."
—Travis F., Quora
4."Prisoners from the nearby jails and prisons were brought for care. The guards would deposit them in a cell area in the basement and then bring them to various clinics….each with a guard. There just happened to be a bathroom in the basement. Inside the one and only stall for this men's room was an electrical panel. It was not locked. Apparently, the prisoners became aware, and a gun was hidden in the panel."
"One prisoner was being brought out and said he had to use the restroom just as he passed the location. He went in and secured the gun. He came out, disarmed the guard, and unlocked himself. He then shot the guard in the head, killing him.
He took the first stairway up. This put him in the back of the clinic.
He opened the door, which was an emergency exit for us, and walked out with a gun. We huddled around. He waved the gun at us and demanded how to get out. He left out the front door of the clinic. Then. Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam. Six shots. A hospital policeman unloaded into him with a full revolver/clip — six shots to the chest. We tried to save him — yup, we really did. The code was called.
A memorial was held for the policeman. We all tried to attend as our duties would allow."
—Christopher F., Quora
5."'THERE IS A SHOOTER IN THE HOSPITAL. THIS IS NOT A JOKE.' I looked up from the operative field for just a brief moment at my attending, Dr. N, a charismatic surgeon we all loved and trusted. He did not look up or even pause. Between us lay a tiny seven-year-old, somehow even tinier under the glare of the OR spots. We were midway through a delicate repair. 'If he comes in here, I'll jump on top of the kid, and you hide under the table,' Dr. N. said."
"There was a sudden clamor in the hall. The nurse— all 90 lbs, 5'2" of her— began barricading the OR door shut with any furniture she could push loose. The very pregnant anesthesiologist, armed with syringes of muscle relaxant, crouched by that door, poised to plunge one straight in the jugular of any invader. Sensing my startled stare, Dr. N shook his head slowly and barely whispered, 'Operate. We have to keep operating now.' The shouts outside the door intensified, then a crash, and a murmuring, and silence.
Time sped back up again after that. I remember calling my husband and parents to tell them I was okay. I remember finding the intern who had been the first to discover the carnage in the hospital lobby, doubled over and gasping, snot trailing down her face. I remember the body of the shooter, splayed on the pavement, his brain exposed, his blood black and hardening in the afternoon sun. He had run right past the room where we had been operating and out the entrance before shooting himself in the head.
Most of all, though, I remember the extraordinary courage of those three amazing people in the operating room with me. They didn't know what they were going to do, but they knew their patient came first."
—Meghann K, Quora
6."A few years ago, while I was working in a hospital, I was leaving the ER through a back staircase. A few steps up, I noticed a big guy coming down the stairs towards me at a fairly high speed. He was carrying what looked like a 1911 pistol in his hand. He wasn't really being very particular where he was aiming the thing. When he saw me, he stopped for a second. He was maybe about 10 feet away. 'Oh, shit,' I thought. All I was carrying was a clipboard. Fortunately, he wasn't looking for me. 'Where's the ER?' he said, slightly out of breath. I silently pointed towards the door at the bottom of the staircase. It was no time to be a hero. He quickly slid right past me and to the door. I followed quietly a few steps behind."
"Someone must have seen him with the gun upstairs because security was waiting for him right outside the ER door. It was the most anticlimactic scene. I never heard him threaten anyone. He never pointed the gun at the security guards when they told him to set it on the floor and back away from it. To this day, I have no idea what he was up to. The police came shortly and took him away, and I went back to work, puzzled."
—Guy M., Quora
7."I am not a surgeon, but my godson is a Trauma Surgeon. The most dangerous thing he found in the body was an unexploded bomb that was a secondary device that was impaled into the abdominal cavity of his patient. It took a lot of courage and adrenaline to come out with everyone alive and the bomb exploding in the bomb disposal trailer in the parking lot and not in the Trauma Center's OR."
—John T., Quora
8."There was an accident at a plant making blasting caps. They got one patient into the OR, where the surgeon found two unexploded caps in his abdomen — so they called the Bomb Squad into the OR. The tech reached in and removed them safely. The surgeon said he was never more scared. The tech said he was scared of reaching into the guy's liver!"
—Charles S, Quora
9."An armed robbery suspect jumped out of his car while being pursued by police. He came into our open ambulance entrance and ran at full speed through our various pods, looking for a way out. Multiple police with guns drawn were chasing him. Some of our guys, incensed at the intrusion, instinctively joined the chase. This guy was NFL material, shedding tackles and spinning and sliding around corners through the entire department. He made it outside and was arrested soon after. Luckily, he'd left his gun in the car."
—William B, Quora
10."Many years ago, I was triaging, and a distraught woman came in and said she needed to see psych because her husband was going to kill her. I asked her why, and she said she had six children, all girls, and was pregnant with the seventh. Her husband said he would kill her if it were another girl, and he had just found out it was a girl. I did not think the husband actually wanted to kill her, but I triaged her anyhow. The next thing I knew, in came this huge burly guy with a butcher knife yelling for his wife."
"I quickly called security and got the woman behind me, but security had not yet arrived when he found his wife. The look of rage on his face made me think he truly was going to kill her and me. I asked the guy why he was so upset and suggested he put the knife down and we could talk about it. He said the same thing his wife told me (that he would kill her). I said to the guy, 'Look, obviously no one told you, but the sex of the child is determined only by the male, and if you kill their mother, you are going to have six children without a mother or father.' It actually stopped him in his tracks long enough for security to get in place and take this guy down. But honestly, I think he might have put the knife down anyway because as they were handcuffing him, he was yelling, 'I am sorry, I didn't know.' Wild night."
—Jessica S., Quora
11."On the afternoon of May 20, 2013, a very large EF5 tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma. This thing was nearly a mile wide and had winds of over 210 mph. It killed 24 people and injured another 200 or so individuals. What a lot of people don't know is that it also struck the Moore Hospital directly."
"The medical staff had advanced warning that they were in the path of the tornado but only about 20 minutes. They decided to move every patient in the hospital from the floors into the cafeteria as it was the most central part of the hospital and felt to be the safest. The staff had to move quickly and decisively to get the 20 or so patients into that space. Just as the last patients were being placed, the storm struck. The hospital took tremendous damage. Directly across the street from the hospital, there was a convenience store that was completely destroyed. All of the people who sheltered there were killed. A paramedic told me that the winds scoured the store from the ground and even tore the ceramic tile from the concrete floor in places (it was likely 'chipped' off with wind-propelled debris… not sucked off). However, not a single patient was injured in that hospital across the street, even though it was utterly destroyed.
After the storm passed, the staff found themselves at 'ground zero' in a disaster zone and set up a triage area for the patients they knew were coming. They cared for the injured all day and night.
I took these pictures of the hospital myself. They give you the idea of the damage."
—Robert F., Quora
12."I work in a large hospital medical surgery unit with a Department of Corrections area. It isn't blocked off from the other patients; it's just a section of the hallway with four to six guards sitting around. One day, a 19-year-old inmate decided he would try to escape. This was back when prisoners were only shackled to the bed if their security level indicated the need for it. This inmate forever changed that protocol to requiring ALL prisoners to remain shackled at all times."
"Back then, the ceilings were tiled in cheap plywood-type squares (which is no longer the case now). This 19-year-old inmate removed his hospital gown, jumped up through a tile in the ceiling, and proceeded to crawl through the ceiling butt naked to his foreseeable freedom. He didn't get far. Two rooms over, he fell through a ceiling tile and landed butt naked atop another inmate who was suffering from encephalopathy and hallucinating at the time. So for quite some time, no one thought anything of it when the hallucinating inmate started screaming, 'A NAKED DUDE JUST FELL OUT THE SKY HERE TO KILL ME!!! HE NAKED! HE'S GONNA KILL ME! NOW HE'S TRYING TO FLY BACK; SHOO SHOO! SHIT, GOD SAVE ME!!'
Finally, a guard decided to check on him. The escapee decided to try to bolt out the hospital room door past the guard and make a run for it down the hallway. He only made it a few yards. The guards knocked him down, and all of the nurses watched as the naked, skinny young man crouched on all fours.
The saddest part was the young dumb man had only two months left of prison time. He could've been a free man by the time he was charged for his 'ceiling adventure,' which got him another 15 years in prison."
—Lynzee, Quora
13."I've seen gang members come to hospitals to try to 'finish off' a rival gang member that was in the department following a shooting. While it is rare, I've seen it twice. One of the individuals got as far as the main department and was only a few rooms from where the rival gang member was getting treated. He had a loaded gun on him, and he had no qualms about discharging that gun in a packed ER. He absolutely did not care about killing or injuring completely innocent staff members or other patients — as long as he could kill the rival gang member."
"Fast-acting and observant law enforcement officers who were staged in the ER prevented it from escalating to what the person intended."
—Zach O., Quora
14."I have operated on several patients in the ED while gang members tried to stop us from saving their opponent's lives. In one case, I actually dropped the instruments and went into the lobby area (a few feet away) and drew my own weapon to stop them from proceeding to wreak havoc on the waiting area as well as the staff. Funny how when they see the surgeon wielding a gun and realize that if they are hit, there won't be ANYONE to treat them, they simply stop acting like moronic idiots and leave."
—Dave L., Quora
15."As a micro neurosurgeon, I only did brains and spines. I was working on a brain when we had an earthquake. Medically, there is nothing you can do except hold on and try and determine if there will be aftershocks. No matter how steady-handed you are, an earthquake is much like the hand of the unknown grasping your hand and determining what will happen next."
"In this instance, after a moment, we were able to continue without simply closing and starting over some hours later. I was extraordinarily lucky in terms of where we were, what the problem was, and it being during a moment when we could pause safely."
—Petr J, Quora
16."I remember this one time that we were operating on a routine hernia surgery, and everything was going according to plan until suddenly, the fire alarm rang out. There was a fire in the adjacent room, and we had to evacuate with the patient still open. We covered the patient with sterile dressings over his wound. We wheeled him out of the OR, into the passage, and into the elevator — all in the span of three minutes. Long story short, the fire was quickly brought under control. We went across in an ambulance to a neighboring nursing home with an operating theatre and completed the procedure there."
"Most surgeons will keep their head in extraneous circumstances because we're trained to work under stress!"
—Dheeraj M, Quora
17."A man had a shotgun under his coat in my office clinic during his appointment, which I conducted alone. I was not aware of any guns. He was nice to me; he was being seen for an upper respiratory infection. His wife was with him. Both seemed ok. Afterward, I was met by a detective and my boss, who asked me about this couple. The man was apparently found shot dead by his wife in the hospital lobby. She was in custody. They wanted to know if I had any reason to suspect something was amiss. I told them I was shocked and could never have imagined this. It was a routine visit for a cold. Glad I did not piss her off or him."
—Mark J., Quora
18."A very large young man with schizophrenia attacked one of our doctors, and they ended up chasing each other around one of the support columns in the nursing station. Violence and growling came from the young man with saucer eyes while the doctor shrieked as they feinted, circled, and danced around the column. It was straight out of a Coen brothers movie. It was gravely dangerous and outrageously comical at the same time. The young man's father, who was even larger, came to the rescue and restrained him until our staff could medicate him."
—William B, Quora
19."I was working as a nurse in a cardiothoracic ICU, taking care of post-open heart surgical patients. I was in charge one day, and one of my colleagues called me over. She suspected that her patient might be having a cardiac tamponade (a slow bleed into the pericardial sac surrounding the heart), which would be potentially fatal but was very rare three days after surgery (normally, it occurred within a few hours of surgery). The patient, meanwhile, a 60-year-old man, was breathing on his own and loudly demanding something to drink. 'Water! I need water! I'm dying of thirst!' He kept saying over and over."
"When patients suddenly have an uncontrollable desire for water or a sudden need to poop when they hadn't eaten in days, that usually meant they were going to die – and soon.
'Give me a glass of water!' He screamed again at the top of his lungs.
The X-ray tech came in and shot a film of his chest. After they left, I walked up to the front of the ICU, waiting for the image to come through. A few minutes later, it began to download. The pericardial sac was filled to the brim with blood and clots, making it about three times its normal size. I called over my shoulder to Nancy. 'Hey, you were right, he has a huge tampo….'
'OH SHIT!' I hear her yell.
Upon hearing the universal ICU code sign for I need help right now, I spun and sprinted down the unit to her bedside. We both stood on either side of the patient's bed, staring at his chest. There was blood seeping out from under his bandage where his fresh incision was. Lots of blood.
At that moment, his chest exploded. A fountain of blood and clots erupted from his chest like a volcano, hitting both of us square in the face, spraying almost to the ceiling, the walls, and the floor.
We both stood there, frozen in shock. With all of our years of experience, we had NEVER seen such a thing. The patient had to be dead. He looked like he had been in a head-on collision with a semi-truck. We stepped forward at the same time, prepared to start CPR to try to save him.
He blinked and looked at us calmly from behind the mask of blood. We glanced at the monitor; his vitals had returned to normal. In a dead flat voice, he said, 'I guess I'm never getting that glass of water now, huh?'
The next day, after he had recovered nicely from his second surgery, Nancy brought him an ice-cold glass of water and let him drink all he wanted.
—Jane U, Quora
20."I worked as in-house security at the hospital near where I lived. The wildest incident that happened was when a Welsh Powerlifting champion suddenly went batshit while waiting to be seen by the doctors."
"I received an emergency page from one of my colleagues to come to the ER ASAP, and by the time I got there, this lad was in full rampage mode. Now his lad was big — 6' 6", 250lb+ solid muscle. He was throwing gurneys and security guards around like they were nothing. His brother — who had brought him to the ER and was equally as big — was tossed across the room like a rag doll.
I and nine other security personnel tried to pacify this raging giant, but we just couldn't get him under control. The situation was only resolved when he tried picking up this massive solid wood desk that probably weighed a couple hundred pounds. He had somehow gotten it off the floor and was trying to raise it above his head when one of his knees gave way. He collapsed to the floor, pinned by the desk, so we all piled onto him and were able to keep him pinned down long enough for the doctor to give him a sedative, and he eventually went unconscious.
When he was eventually examined, they found he had a massive brain tumor, which had been affecting his ability to control his emotions and his sense of what was real and what wasn't and also causing him very painful headaches, and this is what had triggered his manic episode. He told the staff he thought he was being attacked by alien creatures trying to kill him, so he was defending himself.
There was a happy ending to the story in that they were able to remove the tumor successfully and save his life. By all accounts, he made a reasonable full recovery, but he couldn't compete again in his Powerlifting due to the damage he did to his knee."
—Mike Q, Quora
21."A patient with a gunshot wound was brought in by ambulance at two in the morning. The patient had been outside a bar smoking with his friends when a carload of guys drove into the parking lot and started in on him, saying he was from a gang that they didn't get along with. Someone had pulled out a gun and fired. His friends had followed the ambulance to the hospital and were now in the waiting room. About ten minutes later, a new handful of men walked in and headed for the waiting room. There was shouting, cursing, screaming, and yelling. You could hear the scuffling and chairs moving around — then out ran four men. They had stabbed a gentleman who was there awaiting the fate of his friend."
—Lisana T., Quora
22."A few years ago, there was a nasty stabbing that we dealt with. There were two people stabbed with further injuries by others. Emotions were high as you would expect but kept in check. What no one knew was that most of the people were from rival gangs. Within a few minutes the whole of E.D was FULL of morons shouting, swearing and getting aggressive with each other and anyone else who happened to be nearby. It delayed treatment of one of the patients as they could not get through to the resuscitation area and for what seemed like an eternity was absolute chaos and extremely scary. All the clinical staff were threatened with violence in some way, including knives being brandished."
"The poor security were overwhelmed, and several were assaulted, one quite badly. Thankfully, the Police were quickly on the scene and restored order after a short time. Still, it was very scary for hospital and ambulance staff owing to the sheer randomness and willingness to use violence against even us without the slightest care who we were."
—Scott P., Quora
23."I did my nursing training back in the '60s in a small hospital in Central Queensland. I was on night duty by myself one night. At about 3 a.m., I heard loud, heavy footsteps coming from the veranda. Uh oh, methinks, he sounds like a big male person. I hope there’s no trouble. I was about 18 and lightly built. It turns out the visitor was a young kangaroo about my height and hell-bent on getting through the swing doors into the women’s ward. Can't have that, I thought, and wrestled the roo to divert it. In hindsight, that wasn't a sensible thing to do, as a kangaroo can disembowel a person with its powerful back leg and claws."
"However, my tactics worked, and the ladies were spared an unexpected visitor.
This kangaroo had a broken rope around its neck. People back then saw roos as pests (some still do), and one of the things people did before TV was go out roo-shooting. Sometimes, there'd be a joey in the pouch, and they would raise it to adulthood. This one was likely tethered and managed to escape. The worst part was that the day staff coming on duty didn't believe my story — until they saw the creature happily grazing in the hospital yard!"
—Alison L., Quora
24."I was downstairs with my grandmother, waiting for her to be admitted, and there was a 'Code Strong' call for the waiting room. I went out to see what was happening. A meth-fueled woman was flinging her blood at workers and patients in the waiting room because they asked her to get in a wheelchair. She cut the top of her arm open and was flinging blood at people, yelling that she had HIV, and they had to use a Taser and take her down. It was wild."
—Darian S., Quora
25."One scary incident was several years ago. I was doing clinicals for my paramedic license, and the courthouse in our city had a mysterious package delivered with a white substance found inside. Our hospital went into full lockdown mode, and we had some 30 patients brought to us from the courthouse. We had to quarantine the area, and staff members were not allowed to leave the hospital until the FBI and local law enforcement investigated what the substance was."
"Thankfully, it turned out to be nothing, but it was a tough situation as we were tasked with helping these people while having no idea if our lives were in danger. The ER became packed with patients, staff, outside agencies, police, federal officers, and a plethora of news/media and curious people. It was even worse for me because I was there doing clinicals, which meant I wasn't getting paid to be there, and I was essentially stuck in that ER until we got the all clear."
—Zach O., Quora
26."An unstable man came in screaming he was going to kill himself if they didn't help him. The ER doctor tried to calm him down by talking to him to see how he could help him. The guy pulled a handgun, started waving it around, and fired a round into the ceiling. People started screaming, diving for cover, basic pandemonium. A city policeman was out by the ambulance bay when he heard the shot, ran in, and confronted the man, ordering him to drop the weapon. After a tense but brief standoff, the man complied and was taken into custody."
—Luke L., Quora
27."My husband called me at work, asking me to come home because he was in very bad pain. I arrived to find my husband sheet white in the face, shivering uncontrollably, lying on the floor, moaning. I decided to take him directly to the hospital. At about 8 p.m., he was taken on a gurney for an MRI to verify the location of his appendix, which was suspected to be causing his illness. I soon learned he was scheduled for an appendectomy, as it was leaking, as soon as an operating room was available. While we were waiting, a man partially restrained by two police officers came plowing into the area screaming, 'I'll fucking kill you' and similar at the top of his lungs."
"His face was beet red. He lurched toward my husband's gurney, but two more police officers grabbed on, and about four or five large male orderlies fought him down to the ground and managed to get him in a straitjacket and sedate him. He was a mere five feet from us. All I could think of at the time was how to move farther away because if he hit my husband's appendix, my husband would probably die. I was shivering from the incident — they battled him for nearly 15 to 20 minutes, maybe more, and I really felt threatened."
—Sheri H., Quora
28."It was a busy night in 2020. I was an intern posted in the emergency medicine department. It was the second day of my posting. Around 11 p.m., an ambulance siren broke the silence of that cold night. Suddenly, everyone started moving fast. A stretcher was rolled into the ER. An older man — unconscious — was brought in. As interns, we are supposed to do basic history-taking and a general physical examination and then inform our seniors about the case. As I went near the stretcher, I tried looking for a pulse. The hand was very cold. I tried flashing light in his eyes. No reaction. Suddenly, I heard a lot of noises coming from outside the ER. A young, well-built man entered, and everyone was trying to stop him. He was trying to find someone. His first sentence was, 'Whoever has touched my father will be dead.' And then he looked at me. I was shitting my pants."
"Everything happened so fast I couldn't process it. Seniors jumped in; I heard them saying, 'It's a BD case.' Later, I found out BD stands for brought dead. The son got pretty violent. A nurse asked me to go to a doctor's room for some time. I stayed there; I heard a lot of noise. After 20 minutes, I came out and saw a lot of blood spilled on the floor. Broken glass was everywhere. Police had come. The son had a laceration on his hand. I supposed he was trying to break everything, but he got hurt. Another junior was dressing his hand."
—Avinash G., Quora
29."One night, as I was out in triage, I had an older male called Bob, who is a frequent patient because of psych issues. I checked him in. As he was waiting for a bed (it was a decently busy night in the ED), I checked in another patient (let's call him Steve) for insomnia from what looked like a manic episode. As both patients were somewhat calm and relaxed, I started to check in with other people. An hour passed; it seemed they were becoming friends. But then I began to smell burnt skin, so I stood up. Bob and Steve were next to each other, and Steve had a red hot scalpel in his hand and was about to cut into Bob's arm."
"I quickly told them to cut it out and give me the scalpel when Bob started explaining to me that he had microphones in his ulcers and that his brother Steve was trying to help get them out.
I bandaged Bob up and separated the two. Finally, I got a room for Bob, and I thought, 'Great! Nobody else will be doing surgery in my waiting room tonight!' Then, when I walked out of the back of the ED back into the waiting room, Steve started throwing batteries at me, telling me, 'You need to recharge yourself, bro. Recharge yourself!'"
—Andrew D., Quora
30."We once had a 6'5" and 250lbs former Navy seal, who was homicidal and suicidal, walk into the ER with a large bowie knife in his hand. Luckily for us, we talked him down, and he gave us the knife. He could have killed all of us if he had wanted."
—Joe S., Quora
31.Finally, we'll end on one that's slightly lighter: "I was working in the ER in a small town in East Texas. We had a lady come into the ER for a psych eval after police found her wandering around, having hallucinations, and unable to care for herself safely. We’ll call her Dale. Since our hospital is rural and relatively small, we don’t have techs that can come in and just sit with a confused patient, so we always place them in the room directly across from the in-charge nurse's desk and keep the door open. Despite having both auditory and visual hallucinations, talking in word salad, and REALLY not liking to keep her gown on, Dale had been no trouble whatsoever. Getting a bed and a transfer to a psych facility can be extremely difficult, so she had been with us for about six hours. Then, we got an ambulance coming in with a new patient. The nurse who had Dale was busy getting reports from the ambulance crew."
"Well, next thing we know, we hear the ambulance driver yelling, 'Oh shit!!!', and running toward the ambulance bay doors like he was on fire… Dale had gotten up, strolled out the bay doors, and hopped behind the ambulance wheel. Before we could get to her, she peeled off, buck-naked, with the door to the ambulance swinging wide open. She went round the back of the hospital, floored it, hopped the curb, and broke through the barbed wire fencing into the cow pasture. Cows were running for their lives, but she just kept on trucking. She came back through the fence, grinning like a possum, popped back over the curb, and wheeled it around the side towards the medical offices. We just HAD to see how this turned out, so we all ran to the front of the hospital. She came around and was riding through our parking lot, naked as a jaybird, and found the lights and sirens somehow. Her joyride ended without injury when she tried to swing it through a tight spot and finally got stuck… Now, if Dale had injured herself or anyone, it would have been tragic. But the good Lord was looking after her and all of us, and everyone was fine. So seriously, don't judge me — it was easily one of the funniest damn things I've ever seen!"
