Cha-CHING!! I don’t know why, but I’m laughing at this. Just imagine that you’re so good that the lady starts dispensing money, like a slot machine. “YEEEESSSS!!!..clinkclinkclinkclinkclinkclink”
Not a medical professional, but this is something that happened while I was in the ER, internally bleeding gleefully to death (but no one was really aware of the exact problem at that time - fun times, let me tell you)…
It’s about 3am. I hear this WAILING from some guy they just wheeled in. (This is Canada. The ER “stalls” are separated by curtains, the hallways are packed, it’s in the middle of a nasty Influenza epidemic, so every nursing home in the region has sent their old folks to the hospital and caused serious overcrowding issues.)
Anyway, I hear staff talking to him a while, then some SCREAMING… and laughing. A nurse comes in to check on me, giggling insanely. Turns out Dude McDumass broke a few toes, two weeks prior, and knowing there was nothing to be done about broken toes, DUCTTAPED HIS FOOT, tightly, to help ease the pain.
… he’d totally cut off circulation, his toes were turning black, and this is why he’d finally decided to come in to the ER and have it checked out. The screaming happened when they cut off the ducttape.
Never did find out what happened to him. It amused me greatly.
Other fun story, while I was a volunteer at the children’s hospital - kid comes in, staff hysterically laughing behind the admissions counter, the mother equally giggly, kid WAILING his little guts out. Turns out kiddo was playing, and ended up with a saucepan stuck to his head. Mom had tried to remove it using grease (oil, butter, vaseline) to no avail.
See, you’ve got to grease the pan before you put the kid in. Otherwise, he won’t come out clean.
Did you tell him to go boil his head? 
Gives new meaning to the phrase “my two cents,” I guess.
During college I worked as a filing clerk in the radiology dept. of a hospital. The most interesting x-rays I saw were those of a little girl with “Mermaidism” - fused legs forming a sort of ‘tail’ where the thighs would be. Also the foriegn object x-rays were sometimes interesting. I remember one with the Monopoly[sup]TM[/sup] battleship in perfect profile in the esophagus.
Yes…or that you’re bad enough that when you finally find a lady that dispenses money during sex, all you get out of her is one single penny.
I saw a dog once for foreign body ingestion. The owner was pretty sure the dog ate the wedding ring that he was planning to slip onto his brides finger in a few days. A radiograph confirmed the ring was in the colon. I hospitilized the dog and got the prize on the 3rd or 4th rectal exam.
You should have put the dog in one of those crane games and paged QtM.
Not that it’s really comparable to any of the really good stories, but last week in the clinical biochem lab, I got a blood specimen so hemolyzed and so lipemic that when I spun it down it looked like strawberry ice cream in the tube. Half the lab came over to gawk at it.
Er, can you translate this to Undergraduate, please?
So yeah, I can’t resist Googling something someone tells me not to. My teeth just jumped up and tried to eat out my eyes.
Lipemic: very very fatty
Hemolyzed: the red cells were broken up and leaking their innards all over
Out of curious, what could cause that?
Hyperlipidemia (excessively high serum lipid levels) is a matter of too much cholesterol in the blood.
Hemolytic anemia is a disorder of the red blood cells.
If one has both anemia and excessively high cholesterol, one’s blood will be fatty and chock full of damaged red blood cells.
Oh, man. We got a chunk of “tissue” in a few weeks ago that looked like a big loogie. It was just a big ball of snot. I was trying to grind it up with the mortar and pestle and it wouldn’t grind - it just sort of oozed. I had to add a LOT of digestion buffer to get it to a consistency where I could even suck it up into the pipette. I had to call a few people over, and they all agreed it was the most disgusting thing they’d ever seen in the lab. Words just don’t do it justice. It was sort of a pink, smelly snot smoothie.
On the plus side, I eventally managed to isolate enough RNA to get the job done.
We got the occasional extremely lipemic blood sample in the lab, too - I think sometimes it just depends when you take the sample, and what the patient has been eating. Think a couple of hours after a very high-fat meal, and you’ve got lots of fat in your blood.
Smeghead, one of the worst tests we used to do (occasionally) called for mashing a blood clot through a strainer of some kind (I can’t even remember what we were testing for). Mashing a blood clot is exactly as gross as it sounds, even to a lab tech, and it’s pretty damned hard to gross out a lab tech.
I mean, you watch someone dissect a human eyeball*, then a human testicle, then wade through an ice-cream pail full of breast tissue, then come back from lunch to find an old leg in the garbage, and it’s all in a day’s work. And that’s just in the Histotechnology lab. 
*Very cool, by the way. Much tougher than you would expect.
I’ll never forget the time when I worked at Urgent Care, and this couple comes in together. I took their history.
Seems they have had a little long-distance relationship for a short time, a couple of months. On Friday, they’d gone out to a club and picked up another girl. Penis ensued.
Sunday morning, they both wake up with fevers, swollen glands, and canker-like sores on their genitals. Herpes Type II! Later confirmed with viral culture. They were pretty dismayed, to say the least.
Let that be a lesson to ya.
when i worked at an urgent care facility, the doctor asked the man if he wanted it out or should we just change the batteries. ever try to keep a straight face when the doc says something like that?
turns out this guy got it stuck alot. the moral equivalent of a gomer.
At our school valedictory, a former student shared his stories.
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It is possible to fit a 300-mL glass jar up your anus. One patient did just that, and it got stuck. But that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that it broke while he was trying to remove it.
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It is also possible to fit a toothbrush up your urethra. Being a radiologist Mr Alumnus had the dubious honour of x-raying this man. Apparently this caused a very awkward moment later on when he and several colleagues were looking over the x-rays. “Good lord, what IS that?” asked one colleague, to which he immediately replied, “Well, it’s OBVIOUSLY a toothbrush!”
Eek. Or, as one teacher said after the ceremony, “Did anyone check his speech?!”