This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Tehfiddlers on 2024-10-05 19:34:14+00:00.

I’m a nurse – I tell a lot of stories to curious people who tend to regret asking right after. It’s hard to find another job that matches the sheer breadth of human suffering I’m exposed to daily. The human body is an unbelievably beautiful and complex organism that can contort and be contorted in some wildly obscene ways, and I’ve had my fair share of horrible sights in my time. Wounds fester, gallbladders fill with stones, forks get stuck in eyes. We are precious little things, and the same body that can survive a fall from a plane can die from a stubbed toe. Not that I figured the survivor of the fall particularly wanted to live at that point. Anyway, my point being, everybody who’s ever spent any time in a hospital has seen something gnarly that they’d rather leave behind forever. Even sitting in a waiting room can lead to boredom that can lead to a peek through a door that can lead to a burn victim convulsing in his bed – I always hope that the folks who take that home with them develop a new appreciation for life and empathy for their fellow man.

Personally, I worked on the floor that said burn victim was treated on, and his moaning made me grind my teeth all night. Sometimes I want to put my head through the wall as payback for the godawful thoughts I’ve had about people who were suffering and dying with the audacity to do it near me. It’s not a job for everyone. It’s hardly a job for anyone. But you get used to it. You sit in it and live with it. The hospital becomes this third place that no one else can really see. You look at a bed in the corner of the room and you remember the last three people that died in it. The fourth’s face is already gone. It’s good to remember, to appreciate, to hold the knowledge that they were real, they thought and felt, and it can fuck you up if you let it. It’s only now that it’s flooding back in; I let it flow through me, it hits and it goes, the wind doesn’t knock me over, but little bits get stuck. They itch, bad. Now I’m there again. I think I might be done with hospitals soon.

It’s been a couple years. Back then, I was at work every day and almost every night. My divorce sucked bad and I thought it might kill me if I spent any more time at home than I had to. I’m good at my job: I can autopilot for days. Sometimes I sit in my car afterwards and can’t remember a single thing I said or did the whole day – nobody’s ever complained, nobody’s ever given me shit from above. I’m not a surgeon or anything, I wasn’t cutting hearts open with my eyes closed. I was often checking on people who were bedridden, replacing bedpans and listening to them complain in one ear as it went out the other. There’s nothing better to tune out. When I’m in that building, I’m a nurse, not a person. I work and I forget.

That kind of fugue state is not good for you, to say the least. I’d highly recommend trying your best not to get disconnected from reality like that — when it breaks and you come back to the surface, it hits like a truck. It kills. I know it.

In those weeks I spent on autopilot, I slowly realized that I only remembered a single thing from every work day. One patient, in one room. He was an older man who’d been transferred from another facility after spending over a year in a coma. He was just some guy, some normal guy who, according to his family, had fallen unconscious while at home and never woke back up. They visited him sometimes, almost always alone, two young men and one older woman who would just sit with him for an hour or two and whisper to him, like he could still hear. It was a sweet gesture, I thought; too many people are left by their families to rot in their beds. I think unconscious people still have some sort of awareness of reality, even blurred through the impossible layer of a coma. They were always leaving when I came in, sparing me a glance or two before hurrying away. One of the young men always had a certain angry tiredness to him, the circles under his eyes making his frown sharper. He always spent the least time visiting and held himself with a certain rigidity, hands always in his pockets. I was curious, somehow, wondering who they were to him. And, stranger, wondering why I cared at all. At the end of every day, I could only vividly remember being in his room, seeing him with his eyes closed, watching those people whisper and stand and leave. I didn’t care about anything else. But I always remembered that, and only in retrospect. It started to keep me up. I worried my mind was making choices for me.

It was always the same: I’d walk into his room. He was laying there on his back, still, eyes closed. His hands were always clasped over his chest, right over left, and his body was totally straight. I know some people find that creepy, like a corpse in a casket, but I sleep like that too, so it never bothered me. He just seemed so restful. I don’t know what it’s like to be in a coma, but looking at him, I always had a twinge of jealousy. Imagine the rest, the weight off his shoulders. Dreams or empty silence, I thought I’d rather be him than go back to my house and my husband again. So, I always tried to make him comfortable. If his visitors had been by, they often left his head pointed to the side and his pillow jostled into a weird spot that didn’t seem great for his neck. The blanket was always sloppily moved onto him, like they’d fussed with it and forgotten how to set it back up. I figured, why judge them for trying their best to make their loved one more comfortable? Who am I to know what he liked? Regardless, I tried my best. I’d readjust him, fix the curtains at the window, clean up his bedside table, and move the hair from his eyes. It always felt like the right thing to do. I always thought that he had a mild little smile on his face, an upturning at the corner of his lips, something slipping through from his dream, or vice versa. Maybe I made him a little happier, then. I started to focus harder at work, be present, work with the other older patients in my area of the hospital. I slept well.

A few months into his stay, I ran into the tired young man on his way out of the room. His hands were out of his pockets for once, and he was clutching them together with a strange tightness. He was grimacing and breathing heavily. I felt my heart jump. I don’t know what it was. I’d decided to bring flowers, and nearly dropped them as he pushed past me and vanished down the hallway. I had to stop for a moment before I could make myself enter the room.

The man in the bed was still there. He was still on his back, and his hands were still clasped together. The blanket was halfway off of him, worse than usual, and I went to fix it when I noticed something I’d never seen before.

He was wearing a ring. On his right hand, middle finger, he had what looked like a typical wedding band. I couldn’t figure out if it had been there before, if I’d just glossed over it every time, if I was just put off by his visitor’s behavior. It’s not really permitted for long-term coma patients to have any jewelry or accessory like that; who’d have let that slip by for this long? It had to have just been put on him. I wondered if the young man had found his wedding ring and snuck it back to him, which struck me as surprisingly sweet, though I hadn’t heard anything about him being married and none of the visitors identified themselves as or acted anything like a spouse that I could tell. Like I’d know. But there it was, plain and simple on his finger. I went to remove it and had it halfway up his finger when I second-guessed myself and let him keep it. I guess it just felt wrong to rob him of it, after all the time he’d spent alone and unconscious. I let him keep it. I think about that a lot.

It was the next day when everything started. I came in, fixed him up, and was drawing the curtains when he began to groan. It was a low, long, pitiful kind of noise, like a wounded man bleeding out on the floor, alone. It lasted for so long. I immediately looked for any sign of injury or motion, but he still just lay there, mouth hanging open, groaning. It pissed me off. I don’t know why. I hate to admit it, but it pissed me off. Something about the sound just got under my skin in the worst way. I wanted to hit him across the face. I held it in. Some of my coworkers came to investigate, immediately complaining of the sound. We all had this vague frustration with the poor man. They moved him to check for injuries despite my insistence that I already had, jostling him roughly as they flipped him over and looked at his back. There was nothing, of course. He stopped groaning after a few minutes, but it was enough to set us all on edge for the rest of the day. I still fixed him back up in a comfortable position, but there was an undeniable air of unease and frustration in the room. I left him alone.

His visitors stopped coming. I never saw any of them ever again. Every day, he’d groan and we’d all start to slip. It pushed our buttons until they broke. He was alone in that room and he was suffering, loudly. Sometimes he’d cry, or shout, just for a moment, as if in fear. The patients near him became even more irritable. They’d push each other, yell from their beds, leave their rooms unauthorized to insult others from the door. We’d curtly get them back into their beds and then leave to argue with our coworkers. The whole place got nasty. I hated it. It was worse than being ho…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1fwyd8l/my_answer_to_whats_the_worst_thing_youve_ever_seen/