Last night I saw a man die right in front of me. It was the most horrifying thing I have ever seen.

I'm a nurse in a pediatric ICU. I see kids die sometimes, but they're usually young. Like 5 or 6, sometimes infants. The patient I'm talking about here was my age. He was 19. Adult patients are usually seen by the nurses on the adult ward, but because he was admitted as a child we were given his case.<br><br>He came in last night around 2am, moaning and delirious. The doctors thought he'd overdosed on something but he wasn't carrying any ID so we couldn't figure out who he was or what was going on. They had a bunch of tests run and we got some results back pretty quickly. Turns out the kid had some kind of rare genetic disorder that cased his body to just... deteriorate. Like, his muscles and skin and everything just falls apart. It was sickening to look at him. Imagine someone who's been dead for weeks, but alive, and in horrible pain. I felt terrible for the guy.<br><br>We put him on a morphine drip and got in touch with some nearby hospitals in hopes that he had been admitted before and they would know what was going on.<br><br>Ringing. I don't know how to describe it. It was like a low moan, but there was a quality to it I can't describe, like a ring feeding back into itself. I'd never heard anything like it. I got up to go check on him and I saw some of the other nurses writhing on the floor and holding their ears. Then I heard it. The patient I had been looking after was screaming, and it sounded like a siren being run through an effects pedal. I couldn't cover my ears because I needed to help the other nurses and get a doctor, but in that moment all I wanted to do was get away from that awful sound.<br><br>It got louder and louder, and the patient, he was just convulsing and thrashing around. We're talking his whole body was in spasms, like full on seizures. Then he started to fluidize. I don't know how to describe it. It was like he was melting, except it wasn't gradual. There were these bubbles coming out from under his skin, like his insides were boiling and bubbling up through his flesh. The noises he was making, the screaming. It was like nothing I've ever heard before.<br><br>We couldn't do anything for him at the time, we were all just trying to get the other nurses who were having seizures because of his screaming. Eventually he just... exploded. It was like his body was going through some kind of degeneration so fast that when he died all his flesh just fell apart. I'm not gonna describe it any further because the mental image is haunting me. Needless to say it was the most disturbing thing I have ever seen. The patient was in so much pain beforehand and the way he died was inhuman. I can't get over it.<br><br>I never learned the patient's name. I don't know what he was taking, what his condition was, or what happened to his body. He went straight into the incinerator and a mass replacement of staff was promptly made at our ward in the aftermath. Don't ask me any questions because I have no answers. I was there for less than a day, and all I know is what happened and the name of the ward I was at, which I'm not going to tell you.