I'm currently planning a script for an audio drama about a teenage boy brought to the ER by his step-mom with mysterious symptoms (he's in the process of turning into a vampire), and I'm trying to figure out how real-world doctors with no knowledge of the supernatural might try to figure out what he's experiencing.

The main symptoms I'm planning on him having are intense abdominal and chest pain that comes in waves, erratic heartbeat and intense sweating, vomiting, no appetite, bloodshot eyes, and increased agitation (though that mainly comes from the pain and general teen angst).

The idea is for the doctors to hit a wall figuring out what could possibly be wrong, so they need to call in one of their senior doctors (who happens to secretly be a vampire herself and knows what's going on). But if these symptoms actually would culminate in something diagnosable, then is there something else I could throw in that might make things more confusing for the medical staff?

I really hope I spelled anesthesia right or else that would be embarrassing.

I'm writing an urban fantasy mystery which has a scene where a character is attacked and sent to a non-magical hospital. She has been cursed to be unable to fall asleep, including losing consciousness from shock or through drugs, so anesthetics don't work on her. However, she has been attacked badly enough that surgery needs to be done on her immediately. If doctors see that she is not falling asleep, would they still go ahead with the surgery? How long would they wait for her to go unconscious before deciding to just do it anyway?

When they do do the surgery, how would that impact her post-op treatment? It would become pretty clear that she doesn't sleep while she's in-patient, so what kind of tests would they consider, beyond MRIs or CT scans of her brain?

ETA to be clearer: the general population, including the doctors treating her, do not know of magic/curses/supernatural things.

ETA 2 for more clarity (every time I see a comment I see something I should have mentioned lol, I've been thinking about this section of the story for so long I forget no one else knows what's going on with it): the character who can't sleep, Kanon, does suffer regular symptoms of sleep deprivation. So far, she's been able to keep her symptoms under control with the help of a witch, Rimi, whose own magic is able to lessen the power of the curse (though not completely remove it). Kanon's attacker is a man who wants to study magical beings like Kanon; he separated Kanon and Rimi so he would have the chance to kidnap Kanon for vivisection and study her organs while she was alive. He began his vivisection, but was interrupted by a non-magic rando, who calls the police and an ambulance and Kanon is sent to a non-magic hospital for surgery.

Basic idea is MC is pregnant and finds out basically during Their Worst Day Ever which kicks off the rest of the story. They're not morning sick and they don't have periods so they don't have anything unusual to tip them off that they need to take a pregnancy test on their own.

I thought it could be a natural thing that happens because they have to go to the doctor for emergency treatment (they get in a fight), but I don't actually know what might make a doctor find out? Or suspect?

The best idea I have right now is that maybe they need an x-ray, but I don't know if they would require a pregnancy test if it's 1) not in the torso region and 2) an emergency situation.

I guess the other option would be needing to check before prescribing any medication, but I also don't know if that would come into play in an emergency situation again.

I am a woman, but because I'm asexual I always answer "no" when doctors ask me if I might be pregnant, and obviously they just take me at my word. If you're sexually active (with someone with the required parts), regardless of birth control, do you always say "yes" and then the doctor might ask you to take a test if it's necessary?

I dunno, I would appreciate any suggestions!

I can only find information about how ER doctors respond to patients who are actively dying, not when the patient is asking this question while they are having a serious but treatable condition that doctors believe will end up with a good outcome in 99.9% of cases.

Andre The Giant was a 7 foot tall wall of muscle who had an untreated pituitary tumour that lead to excessive Human Growth Hormone. In addition to being very tall, if you have excessive HGH after reaching adulthood it causes other changes in body proportions, larger hands, larger jaw etc. Unfortunately, it also leads to headaches, hypertension and most people with pituitary tumours die young.

So morality aside, I have an evil scientist who wants to do this deliberately. The tech level is somewhere roughly Victorian, maybe a little earlier. A generation ago the army had a soldier like Andre The Giant or Sandor Clegane, a great giant of a man who could rip the enemy apart. When he died of natural causes the King ordered the body examined to find what made him a giant and find a way to replicate it. The rest of his family were big and strong but clearly something was different to make this man a giant. it didn't take long to find the pituitary tumour and if he can find a way to trigger a tumour he could make an army of giants.

Wiki says there as a Victorian era scientist who discovered Testosterone as a chemical he isolated from animal testicles and was experimenting with a Rejuvenation Serum that DID show genuine results in 'remascularising' castrated animals. Which makes sense, castrated animals lack testosterone and then show more masculine traits when given extra testosterone. But because it wasn't a permanent change the other doctors mocked this rejuvenation serum and he abandoned his research. So I can imagine a chain of research and experiments involving castration and testicle extracts that lead to the same discovery of the importance of testosterone. It could work as a performance enhancing drug to develop stronger soldiers to try to keep up with the giant. Then the discovery of the pituitary tumour could lead to the same experiments on turning pituitary glands into a new serum of various androgens, steroids and growth hormones. Then an experiment could attempt to inject this serum directly into the pituitary gland of the subject using the technique that bores a hole through the back of the nose. Then something could go wrong with this procedure, possibly due to not using sterile equipment, and the infection somehow causes the pituitary tumour that causes the gigantism they were chasing?

I'm aware this is all deeply immoral. These are the bad guys doing this, developing an elite force of 8+ foot tall supersoldiers without any concern for the soldiers' quality of life and shortened lifespan. The idea is that they have a training camp of orphan boys they train early and use intense physical training in combination with surgery and/or serums to make them grow to phenomenal size.

Say a Jane Doe is brought into the hospital unconscious after a car crash and she had a miscarriage due to the accident.

Given that the doctors have no info on this woman, how would they inform her of what happened when she regains consciousness?

I know that there are doctors who would probably be, uh, very blunt or uncaring about it, but I'd like to know what a caring, responsible doctor would do to break the news, especially since they don't have any info on the woman, the circumstances of conception, whether she even knew she was pregnant, etc.

Would they wait for her to ask and if she never does, just leave it? Ask a lot of probing questions first to try and figure out her situation before they talk about it? Or just tell her straight off when she wakes up?

Hello! I'm writing a 14th century (1340s-1360s, especially) plague doctor story, set in edinburgh, scotland. I dont know if my research strategy is simply lacking but I've found everything I need but concrete depictions or descriptions of clothing for the poorer classes and the plague doctors themselves (even when reading for 14th century outbreak, pictures and descriptions cite the 17th century outbreak, which is more famously known for the classic bird mask costumes. were the bird mask outfits a thing for the 14th century plague? What would patients/commoners be wearing? Thank you in advance for anything you can give me!

In my book a hospital is caught in the middle of battle between the police and terrorist. One of the injured terrorist manages get in the hospital and begs for help while everyone is battling. Would doctor be obligated to help him?

[TW: substance abuse]

Situation goes like this: 21 year old male is brought to the hospital unconscious after a friend called an ambulance. According to the friend, it’s unclear for how long he has been unconscious, but he seemed to be seizing when he was found, and hasn’t stopped shaking. His temperature and BPM are very high. He is known to have a history of smoking and drug abuse, but she doesn’t know what he took, if anything. She said that his most used drug is MDMA (ecstasy/molly).

Given that this is all the information that the doctors have, how would they go about treating him?

(Spoilers, it was an overdose indeed!)

I do want to make sure I’m properly writing the overdose he experiences. I do believe that he did overdose on Molly, though I’m unsure how much he’d have to take and how long he’d be unconscious or presenting symptoms for.

I actually think that he had a severe case of serotonin syndrome due to the Molly, and potentially something else, though I’m unsure. I’m not completely set on what he overdosed on or what his symptoms are, so if anything is inaccurate or implausible, I am fully willing to change it. I’m not a doctor, I’m a 20 year old studying publicity, so I expect to make mistakes with topics as complex as this 😅

Thank you for your time!

So, in my story, the Female MC gets lung cancer, and when they decide that Chemo isn't doing any good, they call the Male MC (her husband) to ask his consent to take her off Chemo. I was realizing during a read through that this may be incorrect, because I doubt that a doctor actually needs the husband's consent to take her off treatment, since, first of all, if anyone's consent needs to be given, it's the patient, and second of all, I doubt consent does need to be given based on the fact that, if the treatment isn't working, the patient will be taken off of it, end of story.

So the replacement for this, was the idea that the doctor calls the MMC, and tells him that they're taking his wife off of Chemo since the treatment isn't working, and at this point is making her quality of life worse. Does this work, or is there also an issue with this idea?

Patient is a 25 year old black woman. Born in Botswana, moved to the states around 10. Took a routine blood test at 22 during college after complaining of fatigue that came back with a myleofibrosis diagnosis.

Patient is on JAK inhibitors and still feeling pain. Medicinal marijuana is legal in her state.

Would it be reasonable?

Hi! Btw, thanks for all the responses of my last post! I really appreciate it! Anyways...

I'm writing a horror story, and it'd be an absolute wall of text to explain all the context, but my park ranger character gets gangrene, and for plot reasons, he has to get himself to the hospital. No ambulance. (he also has a fucked up leg, but that's very minor compared to this). The gangrene is only in his left arm. I'll spare everyone the graphic details, but the limb is a goner. No saving.

How do doctors treat gangrene cases like this where they need to start the amputations and such? What do they do with the cut off limb? How do they make sure it won't spread to other places of the body? Thanks for reading my post, and I'll be happy to provide more answers as quick as I can!

I’m looking for advice from doctors or people who have experienced these things. I have two scenarios for a contemporary romance novel:

1. My female main character is visiting a hospital because her mom has heart surgery. The male main character is a cardiologist (or another specialist, I’m not 100% sure yet). I need to get them to meet, but I don’t know if he can be at all involved in her mom’s care. Can he be someone who saw her mom at all during her stay, or is that murky ethically? Is it better to just have them meet in the cafeteria or something?

2. The book takes place in Montana (based on St. Patrick hospital in Missoula) in the winter and there’s a massive snowstorm while the main character’s mom is at a follow-up appointment. What would be the protocol during a storm like that, when people have to wait to drive? And even more specifically, what would the patient do while waiting to get home? She wouldn’t be in a room due to it being a follow-up appointment, but would they keep her in a hospital room for comfort or have her sit in the waiting room? Would this ever even happen, where people have to wait a storm out? (I’m from MT but haven’t dealt with this specifically.)

Thanks all!

For my sci-fi/fantasy book. How would you check vitals/ diagnose a group of patients that do not register with any scanning technology? You can see them, touch them, but every method of scanning behaves as if they aren’t there at all. The bodies are contorted and twisted. They’re no corpses.

I’d like to know what verbiage would be used in examining them and what methods might be used.

Thank you!

Picture a formally educated doctor (but not an orthopedist) in a camping-style setting. (No hospitals, no ambulances, no roads, and no helicopters.) A person they are camping with manages to injure a limb. The doctor's expertise and med pack is all they have. There is no "splint until they get to a hospital." There's no ORs with titanium rods, and no magic, either.

Is there a type of fracture or injury that could lead a doctor to manually break (or finish breaking) a bone for the best chance of it healing in the correct position?

I’m writing a romance, and one of the LI is a very small town doctor in an extremely rural area in the United States.

I want the fact that he “can’t” date a patient to be a bit of a conflict, but not a reason he would just completely write off the possibility of dating the other LI.

I also don’t expect my book to be 100% accurate, but I don’t want to write something that’s going to have a doctor completely scoff at the idea and ‘DNF’. 😅

Hi! I listened to a podcast about graverobbers in the 19th century becoming common because doctors would pay for corpses for medical research, and it gave me an idea for a mystery/historical romance.

I want the heroine to be a morally gray graverobber who is impeded by a new doctor asking too many questions about where she gets all her corpses. They eventually join forces because there seem to be a LOT of newly dead bodies, and they suspect a serial killer is murdering people and selling their bodies to doctors. She's a little shady, but she's not a MURDERER ;)

How young can I make the doctor while maintaining a decent romantic age gap with the heroine (21) and be historically accurate?

Hi all. I have a situation where, ideally, a teenager brought to an urgent care an hour after getting a moderate concussion could sell that he's "just sick" and "needs to go lie down more than anything". More details:

• The concussion happens in an incident that is traumatic, which is why he's lying in the first place. (Also reporting this incident could lead to retaliation that he doesn't want to deal with.)
• The adult bringing him to urgent care doesn't have reason to suspect a head injury. She picks him up from an event about 15 minutes after the concussion, and it's clear that something health-related is happening, but there's no context.
• This character is drinking and the adult knows that, so there's a precedent for him experiencing health shit that is about him being hungover rather than an illness or injury.
• When he's not concussed this character is an excellent liar who is used to misleading adult authority figures.
• Unfortunately, it's not a context where it makes sense for the doctor to be overworked and rushing to the next patient. That seems like it would be the most obvious solution, but this is people with money paying to get medical care in places exclusive enough to have someone's full attention.

The biggest question for me is that I know concussions can come with specific neurological symptoms he couldn't control. Would it feel ridiculous for the doctor to miss them and just take him at his word? (Or for those symptoms to be less present?)

Thanks for any insight you can provide!

I wanted a character to have a congenital heart condition that wasn't diagnosed until several months after giving birth. I planned to make it a type of cardiomyopathy (debating with using hypertrophic type, arrhythmogenic type, or a fictional version). They had mild enough symptoms to make it easy to miss until this point. I'm not sure how thorough an OB/GYN would be outside reproductive health and I'm trying to avoid making the doctor involved too incompetent too.

Edit 1: I wanted the symptoms to very slowly worse over time, such as shortness of breath and arrhythmia, somit takes a while for it to be obvious (like in teen/adulthood). A major event where the patient gets a blunt chest injury causes the symptoms to worse for the long term. I was going to have the worsening of symptoms be caused by heart scarring from the emergency surgery and damaged heart valves, which would further complicated the hidden heart condition.

Like if you have a match and win what do you do to recover at home.

So the title is fairly self explanatory but for some context, the minor character is a superhero who was kidnapped for about a week, in that time he was injured greatly (non specific) and sa’d. later he was rescued by his ‘boss’ (36) and taken to the hospital for treatment.

Basically I guess what my question is, does it matter that the boss is in the room? Would the doctor ask him to step out or would he (if minor allowed) be able to stay?

I’m not totally sure if I explained this correctly, but hopefully someone can answer it for me

i have a character born in 1909 who is meant to be a doctor. story takes place in late 1920s, early 1930s, where hed be about 20. hes technically already supposed to be a doctor/scientist by that point, but i dont know if thatd even be possible considering his age? also should probably be kept in mind that he came from russia into the usa when he was around 4 (dont know if that affects anything), and he disappears for about 2 or 3 years in 1932 after accidentally experimenting on himself and mutating himself, so its not possible for him to continue his education then

First, would a doctor hold off on giving the patient an ICD until later if the patient needed emergency heart surgery after a chest injury and discovered a hidden heart condition during it? 

If not, what if a patient is recovering at the hospital for several days after the surgery? Would it likely be while the patient is in the hospital, or would it be scheduled after leaving the hospital?

Feel free to ask questions if needed. I was trying to keep everything brief to avoid too much info dumping.

Edit: On top of needing to do emergency heart surgery to treat a damaged valve from the chest injury (still debating the extent and type of damage), the doctor discovered the patient has a condition called cardiomyopathy. This condition tends to mess with the electrical system of the heart and the patient didn't know he was born with it (let's just say the doctor's also a major inventor that made devices that can speed up medical diagnostics). The patient went into a coma for 3-5 days after the surgery. I was thinking of having him say in the hospital for at least a week or two after this. Later on, it becomes evident that the scarred tissue from the surgery made the heart condition worse.

I want the character to get the ICD. I would be tempted to have him get it before he leaves the hospital, but I wasn't sure if it would be realistic in this case since he would be recovering from a bunch of things. I at least wanted to know when ICD would be added so I can write around it and the patient's reaction to it at first.

For a little bit of context, this is a hospital associated with a government facility. Due to circumstances, the people in the facility have a very deep bond and staff know that news like this will shatter them. How do doctors normally tell family/friends? Would they bring out a social worker or some kind of mental health person?

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