What can I say? I’m on a medical kick of late. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Dr. Oliver Sacks recently, and I saw one of “House, M.D.”'s more medically inaccurate episodes, and participated in a QtM thread, and remembered the old QtM thread about Mr. Bagel Dog Weiner…and I’m wondering about medicine’s weirdest challenges. So doctors, nurses, labbies, whoever, please share your oddest medicine stories. Thanks!
Well, it’s not much, but I took blood from a guy who had a fingernail growing out of his upper arm once. Pretty strange looking, that was.
Jeeze, I hope someone can top that.
Yow! That sounds…really odd looking.
Hmm. Well, not oddest, but I’ve got more respect for this one 50ish guy we had as a patient for a while than I’ve ever had for anyone before or since.
He basically got a really bad infection overnight, went to see his doctor and was immediatly sent to hospital where he proceded to go into shock. He recovered, but the damage to his extremities was already done, by the time he got to our ward his lower legs (knees down) were bloated and black, and all but one thumb were necrotic: so black and shrivelled. Also, his scrotum was literally swollen with fluid to the size of a really large grapefruit.
Despite this, I never heard him complain about anything. He never raised his voice, was always polite, and never seemed to express any kind of horror at his situation. Even when his already hugely swollen scrotum lost a layer of skin from the bottom of it.
He was with us for a while while we tried to save his legs. They were basically necrotic and I’m not entirely sure what they were hoping for but it was good month or so before they finally decided they’d have to amputate – the first and only time I ever saw him get upset. At the same time they also decided to stop waiting for his fingers to drop off by themselves (they looked like something you’d see on a bad zombie costume) and amputate them at the same time.
Anyway, he came back from theatre, and once again didn’t complain about anything, and honestly I don’t think I’ve seen anyone recover as quickly as he did. It wasn’t too long before he was off to rehab.
Now here’s the really amazing thing (I think). A few months later he came back for a visit, not only was he walking on prosthetic legs without any kind of aid – so no walking stick or anything – he was once again taking care of his wheelchair bound wife.
Here’s a case I had that I thought was pretty cool.
I had 2 cows referred in the veterinary hospital in which I work as part of a herd problem. Both cows looked terrible - scruffy, skinny, typical cow problems, etc. Because they had abnormal lung sounds we performed a tracheal wash to culture for bacteria. It’s a routine test we do to determine what bacteria is in there and what antibiotics will work best on them.
We send off the test and meanwhile don’t do anything for the cows except feed them a decent diet. They are very appreciative and ate like they’ve never seen good hay in their lives. Within 5 days they are happy cows indeed. Then I hear back from the lab - they grew the bacteria which causes typhoid in humans from the lungs. Because I deal with this lab all the time and they can be, shall we say, slipshod, my internal reaction was “Bullshit” but I remarked “How interesting.”
“I didn’t believe it either,” said the lab supervisor, “so we sent it out to CDC and it really is typhoid. They want you to sample the other cow and also submit feces from both for culture.”
That was easy enough - there is never any trouble securing manure from a cow and we did a tracheal wash on the second. All cultures came back positive to typhoid.
Now typhoid isn’t known as a pathogen in cattle, and ,true its word - the cows were doing great. They never appeared particularly ill, just underfed.
We sent them home, then went with the health department to try to figure out where the typhoid was coming from. The farm had seen better days and was bare bones at best - but no obvious sources of contamination were found. There was, however, a large creek running through the cow pasture and this how the cows got their water. The health co. guy wanted to know what was upstream.
“Just some hill people” was the reply. [For those who might not know, Southern Indiana takes a back seat to no state when it comes to backwater hillbillies.]
After some investigation by the health department - it was found that some of the hillbilly families were using the creek as their septic tank - in the process putting human bacteria like typhoid into the water. Something I did not know was that this bacteria is pretty much normal human gut flora. It only causes disease when you are unlucky enough to get the bacteria that has a gene to make the toxin.
The cows were unaffected sentinals in this instance- we just picked up the typhoid incidentally. The reason for the poor milk production (the reason the cows were sent in) was lack of groceries.
This doesn’t rate with fingernails growing out of arms, but I offer you this:
Certain exotic woods can be irritating, even toxic, to certain individuals. if you come in contact with its wood dust (say, as a woodworker) it will give you a variety of symptoms. Some of them are a bit unexpected. One unique combination that stumped our family doctor: inflamed eyes and swelling of the scrotum.
I know an emergency room doctor. His stories are fantastic, and he tells them in such a sincere way. My favorite gem of his:
“…and you know that if someone has lost a vibrator up their ass it is normally still switched-on by the time they come to me. Ever try to remove a moving object from someone’s ass?”
-Tcat
It’s not that difficult. It just takes a little practice. Obviously this ER doc hadn’t been called on to do it very often. If I can’t get it with a ring forceps or some superglue or both, I just wait for the batteries to run down.
…
You must be a crane machine God.
Not me, but my wife.
She once had a case where a man broke his penis.
No crap, he jumped on his enamorata, fully erect, but missed, and did some severe vascular damage to it.
How do your patients get access to sex toys?
Silentgoldfish, that guy sounds like a real badass.
Cecil has a good article on this, which I’m too lazy to track down right now 
This is not my strangest, but we seem to be on a sex-related tack: I assumed care of a bachelor farmer who had gotten a massive metal bushing lodged around the base of his erect penis. Incidentally, his explanation for this was that a cow must have had the bushing caught in its foot, and when it kicked him, it managed to…uh… thread it onto his junk… uh… somehow… (Whatever, dude, we really don’t care). Anyway, he decided to take care of the problem himself by cutting through the bushing with a Dremel and a cutter head. Apparently it took him more than a day to cut through the bushing on one side, but he had not accounted for the fact that a steel cylinder 1/4" thick can’t just be pried open like a soda can. So, he started in on the other side, but things were getting bad. His brother stopped by and noted that the farmer smelled like death, and convinced him to go to the hospital. He was immediately diagnosed with Fournier’s gangrene. Google this at your peril; it is gangrene of the recto/genital/inguinal area and is very life-threatening. The skin of his penis had died, along with the glans and his scrotum, and infection had ravaged everything from mid-thigh to bellybutton down to the muscle, so he needed a lot of skin grafting.
Anyway, the grimly amusing bit was seeing him every day in penile traction, with a Foley catheter in what remained of his penis hooked to a cord that looped over a pulley on the overhead bed frame to a 1/2# weight. This was to keep the penis from sticking down to the surrounding raw flesh. His testes survived and were sewn into pockets made in his thigh muscles in anticipation of eventual scrotal reconstruction.
I can only relate this one as told to me by a cow-orker…
An Eastern European woman came into the ER asking for an x-ray. When asked why she wanted one she said, “Because I can’t find a penny.”
Seems she was under the impression that two copper pennies were an effective means of birth control, and, several hours post-coitus, she had only been able to retrieve one.
An pelvis x-ray was done. No penny.
Who knows? Maybe her gentleman friend had “hit the jackpot” earlier and just didn’t tell her.
Hey, I had a private practice for 16 years before I did corrections medicine. I retrieved lots of foreign bodies from different holes.
y’all may want to peruse this thread
Oh, except when the poor guy waits until MONDAY MORNING before coming to the Emergency Department…when the incident in question happened on the Friday night.
His reasoning: " I thought it would sort of work its way out"…hope, as they say, springs eternal. He needed surgery, because after 60 hours, there was absolutely no way it was coming out by any other means.
The thing he wanted to make clear to everyone was that it had happened when a session with his wife got out of hand- apparently the one thing he was most concerned about was that everyone not think he was gay.
I still don’t quite know how he managed for those 2 and a half days with an 8" vibrator in his rectum.
The New York Times has a weekly case study, I think, in the glossy magazine. the cases there are interesting and somewhat odd, but not usually of the rectally-occluded-cucumber variety.