This Emergency Room Doctor Is Sharing One Of His Craziest Stories About A Patient Who Was Displaying Strange Behavior When She Came In

Emily Chan |

Apr 9, 2023

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Doctors see countless patients throughout their careers, so they have witnessed many weird things while on the job.

A TikTok creator and emergency medicine physician who goes by Dr. Joe (@drjoe_md) is sharing a crazy story about a disoriented woman who came into the emergency room one day.

So a guy had brought his wife into the emergency department for an evaluation because she was displaying strange behavior. It was unusual because she was a normal, healthy woman in her late twenties.

Over the past couple of days, she had been acting increasingly confused and disoriented. At first, she was behaving a bit bizarrely and experiencing fatigue, so she was sleeping a lot.

But that morning, she was extremely confused. Her husband reported that he had difficulty getting her out of bed, and she wasn’t making any sense when he tried to talk to her.

There was nothing out of the ordinary with her physical exam, so Dr. Joe and his team decided to do some bloodwork, a pregnancy test, and perform a CAT scan on her head.

When the nurse got the results of the woman’s urine test back, they discovered that the woman was pregnant.

But that still didn’t answer the question of what was causing the woman’s disoriented state. So Dr. Joe went ahead with the CAT scan.

“We don’t normally like to do CAT scans on pregnant women, but in this case, it was pretty necessary because if she had some bleeding tumor or something on her brain, we needed to see it right away,” explained Dr. Joe.

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As Dr. Joe was analyzing the images during the CAT scan, he saw no sign of a brain tumor or internal bleeding.

“So all we have is this healthy woman in her late twenties that’s very confused and now pregnant,” said the doctor.

“I’m thinking of all the different possibilities. What could this be? But nothing’s really coming up as a clear source of why she’s confused,” he continued.

Then, her lab work results came back, and it turned out her sodium levels were sky-high. According to Dr. Joe, when a person’s sodium levels get too low or too high, they can develop neurological symptoms.

At that point, they hadn’t yet figured out what caused her sodium levels to shoot through the roof. Meanwhile, Dr. Joe started the woman on the proper treatment and ultimately admitted her to the ICU. She was still confused, but her condition was stable.

After doing more investigating, Dr. Joe finally found out why her sodium levels were so high. Even though she didn’t know she was pregnant, she had developed a side effect of pregnancy that many women experience.

And that side effect happened to be abnormal food cravings. Prior to her visit to the ER, she had been craving soy sauce! She actually drank one to two cups of it at a time.

In the end, Dr. Joe revealed that the mom and baby both survived without harm!