Being a veterinarian can be both humorous and frustrating. Certainly, some of the things animals do are hilarious. Hence, they are often featured on TV shows like The Planet’s Funniest Animals. But a lot of the humor comes from their owners, who are—to put it nicely—eccentric. I could regale you of stories such as the owner who insisted there were men on her roof blowing poison gas down her chimney. Periodically she brought in her “poisoned dog.” We would keep the dog for a few hours to “detoxify” it and send it home cured. At times like those, I was glad I was the dog’s doctor and not the owner’s.

I hear the horror stories from my colleagues in human medicine. Once, while waiting at my pediatrician’s office, I couldn’t help but overhear an unreasonable woman in the next room arguing loudly with the poor doctor. Finally, he finished with that appointment and came into our room. When he walked in, he said, “Oh, thank God! Normal people!”

Here are some true stories gleaned from several minutes of Google research on things physicians have had to put up with from their human patients:
1. A patient complained to her doctor that although the ear drops cured her ear infection, it tasted awful.
2. A doctor giving his patient the results of her sleep apnea test told her she’d stopped breathing 65 times. She asked, “Did I start back?”
3. A doctor prescribed an inhaler for his patient’s cat allergy. A week later, he came back, saying he wasn’t any better. He was spraying the inhaler on the cat.
4. A patient told his doctor, “My daddy has thyroids, and I do, too.”
5. A patient called her doctor to ask if the cream he’d prescribed would work while she was on vacation. When assured it would, she said, “I was told to apply it locally.”
6. A patient asked her doctor if he could tell the race of her baby on an ultrasound.
7. A patient asked if the surgeon could do her C-section laparoscopically.
8. A patient told a nurse he was scheduled to have an autopsy (biopsy) in the morning.
9. A doctor asked a patient complaining of dizziness if she had ever been diagnosed with vertigo. Her daughter said, “No, she’s a Libra.”
10. An anti-vaccine mother yelled at the doctor for not having a treatment for her child’s chicken pox. (Um, it’s called a vaccine.)
11. A man went into the ER with his arm all torn up. He had tried to shoot the neighbor’s dog because it was barking, but he missed. The dog got his arm and chewed him up good. He was treated and released. Two hours later, the same guy is back with his other arm chewed up. He went home to finish the job, missed again, and the dog got his other arm.
12. A guy came into the ER who had nearly severed one of his fingers while chopping wood while wasted. He was already down to only 2 fingers from previous wood-cutting accidents.

As it is, I would rather be the veterinarian treating the curious Labrador for snakebite than the physician treating the snake-bitten twenty-one-year-old male whose famous last words were, “Here, hold my beer. Watch this!”

1. https://www.rd.com/list/funniest-things-doctors-office/
2. https://nurseslabs.com/20-funny-things-patients-ever-said-nurses/
3. https://www.nursebuff.com/funniest-things-patients-say/
4. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6wohrs/serious_doctors_of_reddit_what_is_the_most_stupid/?rdt=44647