Just 17 Of The Most Bizarre Medical Cases On Grey’s Anatomy

One of the weirdest cases occured only four episodes into Grey’s Anatomy. Alex (Justin Chambers) and Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) were called in to assist Derek (Patrick Dempsey) with treating Jorge Cruz (F.J. Rio), a guy who fell down the stairs while holding a nail gun and ended up with sixteen nails embedded in his head. Although operating on him was risky, Jorge’s wife Zona (Valerie Cruz) ultimately decided surgery was worth a shot at more time with her husband.

Season 1 featured another undeniably strange case, in which a woman named Annie (Alex Alexander) had a tumor roughly the size of a human child. She hesitated to seek treatment because she was afraid of hospitals, leaving the doctors no choice but to attempt to remove it in a 14-hour surgery. Unfortunately, Annie didn’t make it out of the procedure alive.

Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) and audiences were taken aback when a patient’s (Scott Michael Campbell) X-ray showed ten little faces. It turned out, he had swallowed a bunch of Judy doll heads in order to stop feeling “empty inside.” There was no mental health explanation for why he did this, but swallowing dolls did obstruct his bowel movements.

This case was as weird as it was tear-jerking. In Season 2, Episode 6, the doctors were tasked with caring for victims of a terrible train accident. This included strangers Bonnie (Monica Keena) and Tom (Bruce A. Young), who were impaled on the same metal pole. After everyone realized they had to move one person off the pole to save the other, the more severely injured Bonnie sacrificed herself for her new friend.

Who could forget the infamous Code Black episode? In one of the show’s strangest cases, a patient (John Bishop) was brought in with a live bomb stuck in his chest cavity. To make matters even more tense, Meredith had to stick her hand over it to stop the guy from bleeding out. Somehow, they both survived.

Multiple orgasms are usually great, but as this Grey’s episode reminded viewers, you can have too much of a good thing. The doctors wound up treating a young college student named Pamela (Arlene Tur), who suffered from spontaneous orgasms that made her get into a car accident. Luckily, the interns were able to patch her up and somehow use this case as a metaphor for their personal drama.

Before Abigail Breslin was on Scream Queens, she appeared as a memorable patient in Grey’s Anatomy Season 3. Alex was worried Breslin’s character Megan was being abused, because she showed up to the hospital covered in bruises. But it turned out she had a genetic condition called CIPA (congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis), which the doctors were able to fix with surgery.

In this episode, the surgeons heard a woman (Faith Prince) was being admitted with a “foreign body” stuck inside her. It turned out the “foreign body” was her ex-husband (Arye Gross), and when they decided to hook up earlier that day, his piercing got caught on her IUD. To make matters worse, he had a heart attack, and their daughter walked in on them in an… um… intimate position. Talk about an awkward case.

What if a person was literally toxic? The Grey’s doctors came face-to-face with this reality when they began caring for Marina (Amanda Collins), a patient whose blood was full of neurotoxins created by a controversial cancer treatment drug. In one of the most striking moments in the show’s history, several characters passed out in the operating room after exposure to her blood. Yet somehow she made it through.

Hospital chairman Larry (Mitch Pileggi) was admitted to Seattle Grace with swollen testicles after a fish called a Candiru swam into his penis while he peed in the Amazon River. Believe it or not, this rare fish is rumored to be able to jump into people’s urethras. However, this wild occurrence has never been medically proven.

Talk about a memorable Halloween episode. In Season 4, a man called Mr. Miller (Rocky Carroll) showed up to Seattle Grace begging the doctors to amputate his foot, which he claimed wasn’t actually his foot. When they refused and ordered a psych evaluation, he took matters into his own hands by seizing a surgeon’s saw and cutting off the foot himself.

Do not take truth or dare lightly, folks. This infamous Season 4 case introduced Andrew (James Immekus), a teenager who became encased in a vat of cement after his friends dared him to jump in wet cement. The cement began burning him and poisoning his organs, but he was saved after Cristina performed a risky heart surgery on him.

One of Grey’s Anatomy’s more famous guest stars over the years was Demi Lovato, who played a girl who tried to claw her eyes out. Although the doctors initially suspected she had paranoid schizophrenia, it turned out she had a hole in her inner ear that allowed her to hear everything inside her body (aka superior canal dehiscence syndrome). Luckily, Alex was able to repair the hole and send her home good as new.

OK, this patient didn’t technically have trees for hands, but it sure looked like it. In this episode, Bailey tended to Jerry (Art Chudabala), a guy with warts covering his face and hands, making them look like tree bark claws. It turned out to be a form of HPV, and as the doctors performed surgery to remove the warts, a spider crawled out of him. Yikes.

Season 7 patient Raul (Wilmer Calderon) was admitted to the ER for coughing up blood, leading Owen (Kevin McKidd) and Cristina to conduct a bronchoscopy to check for cancer. But it turned out Raul actually had a little fir tree growing in his lung. Don’t swallow seeds, kids.

Poor little Tyler entered the world with part of his brain on the outside of his skull. Jackson (Jesse Williams) and visiting doctor Lauren (Hilarie Burton) miraculously managed to get his brain right back where it belonged, thanks to a fancy bone mapping program. And yet somehow, this remarkable achievement isn’t the most memorable part of this episode, which is largely devoted to the Seattle Grace doctors’ personal problems.

A baby’s death is always tragic, but this case was even more upsetting because it was so personal. Jackson and April (Sarah Drew) were forced to induce labor at 24 weeks after finding out their son Samuel’s bones were breaking in the womb due to a rare condition called type II osteogenesis imperfecta. In arguably one of the most upsetting scenes in Grey’s history, the couple briefly got to hold him before saying goodbye.

It turns out, Drew pitched this storyline to the Grey’s writers because a family friend’s baby actually passed away from this condition.