The 5 Most Terrifying Ways Doctors Went Crazy on the Job

5 The Surgeon Who Carved His Initials into a Patient

It's hard to imagine anyone getting really pumped up about performing surgery, but we suppose every job has "that guy." You know -- somebody who's always trash talking and fist bumping and referring to himself by some nickname like "Z-Bone." The type of surgeon who, after a successful procedure, would decide to sign his fucking name to it like a pro athlete signing a game ball.

That brings us to Dr. Allan Zarkin, who was so pleased with the Caesarean section he performed that he decided to tag it with his initials. We don't mean he pulled out a Sharpie, either -- Zarkin (appropriately nicknamed "Dr. Zorro" by the press) carved the initials "AZ" into Liana Gedz's stomach, presumably forgetting that human beings are not pumpkins, public playground equipment or school desks.

Apparently, Zarkin had a reputation among hospital staff for being "larger than life" and "a little nutty," citing his fashionable dress and joking nature. Gedz, however, had to go and remind everybody that the real world does not tolerate wacky surgeons as easily as in the Scrubs universe and sued Zarkin and the hospital for $5.5 million in damages.

Remarkably, Zarkin's defense was that he has a degenerative brain condition called Pick's disease. Well, that's OK then. Because nothing says "acquit" like "I shouldn't be performing surgery in the first place because my brain is dying."

Naturally, Zarkin was dismissed from Beth Israel Hospital, which had been fined $14,000 by the state, in addition to the massive lawsuit from the patient. So you'd think he'd vanish quietly into retirement, right? Actually, a few months after the incident, he got another job at Choices Women's Medical Center performing, you guessed it, women's health services. Good thing he got that brain thing fixed!

4 The Nurse Who Injected Herself With Her Patient's Drugs

So, imagine you're on the operating table, waiting for surgery to remove kidney stones. You're already nervous, anxious for it to be over, wondering how much it's going to hurt. The nurse comes in with a syringe containing your anesthetic. She promptly sticks it into her own arm and presses down the plunger. You'd have a million questions, and would probably be unable to bring yourself to ask any of them.

This scenario played out for patient Larry King (not that Larry King), who went in for surgery and came out with a horrible, horrible story to tell. Nurse Sarah May Casareto was working that day, and her opiate addiction had her jonesing for some high-end medical drugs. When she saw that syringe, it was evidently too much to bear, and she knew she had to put her own addiction ahead of the patient's need to not be in indescribable agony.

Now, don't worry, she didn't take all of King's anesthetic -- only two-thirds of it. So he did have a third of the prescribed dose, which, as it turns out, is not nearly enough for a man about to have sharp stones slowly dug out of his body.

Oddly, the other staff don't seem to have put two and two together when King started screaming that he could feel the knife slicing into his kidneys, while Casareto started acting high as balls (even falling asleep at one point). During the agonizing ordeal, Casareto urged the writhing King to "man up" and "go to his happy place," which trusted sources tell us are not the words that a man with a tube drilled through his back wants to hear.

Eventually, someone did manage to connect the mysterious disappearing anesthetic with the tripping nurse. That is, after King went to the police to file a report, and Casareto was arrested. We're hoping that in court she went for the "I was aiming the needle at the patient but I missed" defense.

3 The Surgeon Who Went to the Bank (During Surgery)

Look, every single person reading this has had a day at work where you just mailed it in, because there were other things going on in your life and you just couldn't focus on the job. We don't care if you work on an assembly line pushing chips into Pringles tubes or if you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you've had that day when you just weren't all the way there, mentally. You spent the day checking your email for some important message you were expecting, or on the phone dealing with some bank or Realtor or lawyer.

Surgeons are no different. For instance, say you're a surgeon with money problems. You're at work, worrying yourself into knots about whether those checks you wrote will get cashed before you can deposit your paycheck. You're fretting about it, you're distracted. Also, you've got a patient lying on the table with his back opened up, because you have an intensive all-day spine operation, and it's not like you can just reschedule it. Who's going to really notice if you just leave for half an hour to go cash your paycheck?

Patient Charles Algeri was the one lying in the OR getting his spine welded together by Dr. David Arndt in a marathon daylong surgery when it became clear that the doctor had other concerns on his mind. He repeatedly asked the nurses to find out if his paycheck had arrived. When another surgeon, Leo Troy, passed by to drop the check off, Arndt asked Troy to watch the patient for "about five minutes." Then the surgeon walked right the hell out of the hospital, got behind the wheel of his car (hopefully still wearing blood-stained scrubs) and drove to the bank. Bill collectors don't wait, bro!

Those few minutes turned into half an hour, and Algeri (who found out about it after the surgery) didn't think that the doc avoiding late fees was a good enough reason to leave him lying wide open on an operating table. He sued the surgeon for malpractice, dooming who knows how many patients to having a doctor perform surgery on them while he's on the phone with his lawyer.

2 The Doctor Who Attacked His Lover With an Abortion Syringe

Logically, there is no reason why a certain percentage of doctors wouldn't be batshit crazy. Getting through medical school requires intelligence and dedication, sure, but you can have both of those things and still be at least somewhat nuts. And when doctors go off the deep end, they have some more advanced methods for going crazy than the rest of us.

For instance, in early 2000, Dr. Stephen Pack was in a bit of a pickle: He'd knocked up a nurse that he was dicking after hours. Pack was a married man, and absolutely didn't want a love child. But instead of taking the usual shitty dad tactic of abandoning the kid, Pack came up with an even douchier, more psychopathic solution.

You might already know that there are drugs that can induce an abortion if injected (basically a version of the abortion drug RU-486 that can be administered by syringe). You think you know where this story is going -- he probably hatched some evil plan to trick her into taking it, right? Maybe lured her in for a checkup and told her it was vitamins or something?

Nope. He hid in the shadows of the parking lot with his syringe and waited for nurse Joy Schepis to walk by. Then Pack jumped out of the shadows and announced his attack like a cartoon villain, shouting, "I'm going to give you an abortion!" as he started wildly stabbing Schepis in the thigh and buttocks with the needle.

When his totally brilliant and expertly executed plan fell apart (it's actually really hard to successfully give someone an injection this way), Pack fled from the parking lot of Montefiore Medical Center to the nearby North Central Bronx Hospital. Upon arriving, he properly deposited the empty syringes into a medical waste container, as any responsible physician would.

The good news is that the baby was perfectly fine, and since enough sane people did their jobs with satisfactory proficiency, Pack got what was coming to him. He got two years in prison and had to undergo 100 hours of therapy, after which he reached out to Schepis with an apology, presumably via one of those "Sorry I Flailed at You With an Abortion Needle" cards from Hallmark.

It does seem like somebody who does what Pack did might be more than 100 hours of therapy away from a healthy mind, but we're not medical professionals.

1 The Doctor Who Gave His Girlfriend a Corpse Hand

Everyone has done something a little embarrassing in the name of love. We've all stood outside someone's window with a guitar, or, you know, lovingly dismembered a corpse to offer as a tip for our stripper girlfriend. Wait, maybe that one isn't so common. But that's what Dr. Ahmed Rashed did back in 2002, while he was studying in medical school.

The crime was discovered when police entered the home of topless dancer Linda Kay on an unrelated matter, a matter which probably took a back seat as soon as the cops saw the severed hand sitting in a jar on her dresser.

The story goes that Dr. Rashed, who was still just Mr. Rashed back then, became friendly with Kay while he was studying and she was taking her clothes off for money. Presumably, he told her that he'd do anything for a date, and she asked, "Anything?"

The hand came from a cadaver at the university that was due to be cremated, and according to Rashed's defense, he didn't realize that what he was doing was illegal. That's right, at no point while he was standing next to a casket with a bone saw, vigorously hacking some dead guy's hand off, did he take a moment to ask himself, "Wait a second, would this be considered illegal? Or insane?"

Rashed then took the hand back to the strip club and offered it to Kay, who not only didn't Mace him, but kept the damn thing for four years. It was only then, when Rashed was a licensed physician in Los Angeles, that he had to account for the whole situation and was arrested for theft, presumably after the judge had to flip through the law books to figure out what to charge him with.

For more folks who lost their shit, check out The 6 Most Insane People to Ever Run for President and 7 Athletes Who Had More Crazy Than Talent.

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