Rectal Foreign Bodies
I’m pretty convinced a big plus of going into the surgical or emergency medicine fields is the stories that you get out of it. Blatantly stolen from an attending:
“You wouldn’t believe the kind of lies people make up when they present to the ER with something stuck up their butt. My favorite? A man comes to the ER with a zucchini up there, and proceeds to tell me, ‘Yeah, I was gardening naked tonight at home when I fell backwards and it got stuck up there.’”
Another hint from the attending–”If you ever get a votive candle stuck, don’t just pull on the wick. It’ll come right out, because your body has warmed up the candle wax, and you just won’t get anywhere.”
I’m tellin’ ya. It’s all about the stories.
A few years ago, one of the local radio stations had an ER doctor on the show who, if I am not mistaken, had published a book full of strange stories from the ER. When asked about the most memorable, the doctor remarked that a thirteen-year-old boy and his father came into the hospital one night because the boy’s stomach was hurting. Once in private (or as private as it gets), the father said that he caught his son masturbating…while sticking fishing line into his pee hole. The boy began pulling the fishing line out, but soon felt too much pain and couldn’t continue retrieving the rest.
The doctors ordered an x-ray or MRI, something to see what the problem was, and were stunned to find that a few feet of fishing line was tangled around the kid’s urethra. (I think that’s what it is called, at least.) A specialist doctor was called in for consultation and it was decided that surgery was the only way to get the fishing line out.
The radio show hosts then asked how they operated on such a delicate thing as the penis. “It was sort of like cutting a fish for fillet,” the doctor responded.
Honestly, I would like to be a fly on the wall in the ER on a busy night, just to hear the stories.
How do you keep a straight face? I’d be rolling on the floor laughing.