Heads do massive bleeding. It’s always alarming to parents.
The entire intestine has a pretty copious blood supply. A hernia means there is a defect in the abdominal wall^ where some of the bowel or associated fat may poke through, intermittently or most of the time. Big hernias are less dangerous than small ones. They are very painful and often dangerous if the blood supply to the protruding part of bowel is cut off, and this is a medical emergency if the hernia cannot be easily reduced. ERs do see strangulated hernias from time to time. They are sometimes acute without a long period of bowel obstruction.
^People with hernias understand this, of course, but I am describing it for general audience.
I was using a kitchen knife to separate two frozen burgers, but the knife slipped and went right into the palm of my hand. It didn’t look bad for a second, but when my heart beat there was a fountain of blood. I applied direct pressure with a dish towel and got my four year old to dial 911 and hold the phone up to my ear. I then had to call a neighbor to stay with the kids. My wife was on her way home from work, and we didn’t have cell phones back then. When she got home our two year old said “Dad squirted.” The bleeding was stopped when the ambulance came, but I had to go get stitched up. The dog licked the blood up off the floor.
On the subject of minor eye injuries. As an ER nurse these are some of the easiest to ease the pain.
2 drops of Alcaine. 30 seconds and immediate (temporary) relief. No IV, no waiting for oral meds to take effect.
Well we know who the dog has a taste for now.
Don’t trip and conk your head. Alone in the house.
That dog crossed the bridge in 2009, so she’d best hope there’s blood in the hereafter.
Coming home from my uncle’s funeral, my mother broke her foot stepping out of her shoe.
She also fell on the curb of the Taco Bell that my sister now works at (though she wasn’t, at the time), and broke her arm.
Maybe counting as off-topic, since these all occurred to someone else (definitely NOT me), but on another thread I stumbled across
The best bit on scrubs
The Celtling once got hit in the eye with a paper airplane. Corneal abrasion - a couple days of pain followed by several days of deep discomfort.
I injured my neck trying to stuff a ten foot teddy bear into the back of my suv. It was such an odd strain, it would hurt when I tried to take a bite of food, or moved in certain directions, otherwise it was fine. A few days in a neck brace put it right again.
I had a friend tell a story about her and her husband being creative in the bedroom and got a fruit stuck in her private area.
My eye injury… I was in my friend’s backyard playing basketball on his court while he was mowing his lawn. A rock from the lawnmower hit me in the eye. My mom was in the hospital with my newborn brother and my grandmother was babysitting. I didn’t tell her about it until a couple days later with something like “I was hit in my eye with a rock a couple days ago, and it still hurts”. She was MAD at me.
Years later there is still a scar inside my eye.
This one isn’t so much a freak injury as a freak occurrence, but it did result in a trip to the ER. One time I was over at my friend Dave’s house along with another friend, Mark. It was a pleasant summer evening so we were sitting out in Dave’s garage drinking beer.
There was a small white moth circling the light bulb in the garage. Suddenly the moth flew directly into Mark’s ear. “Aah!” said Mark, “it’s in my ear! Get it out! Get it out!”
There happened to be a hemostat nearby, on the workbench. Dave thought we could use it to get the moth out. I said I thought that was a bad idea, we shouldn’t go poking metal things into Mark’s ear. So off to the ER we went. “It’s buzzing in my ear” said Mark. “It’s driving me crazy!”
The doctor looked in Mark’s ear with one of those scopes and said “Look at that! It’s looking back at me!” “Get it out!” said Mark.
The doctor called another doctor over, and a nurse, and said “Look at that!”
“Get it out” said Mark.
They ended up slowly pouring some water into his ear and floated the moth out. So no real injury occurred.
You know you’re having a bad-ish day when the docs start calling their pals to come look at your predicament.
And when they can’t suppress a giggle.
In a column some years ago titled “Medical Mysteries”, Dave Barry mentioned a letter he’d received from an ER nurse. A man came into the ER with his hands covering his face, demanding to see a male doctor, and to see him alone. They complied, the doctor fearing some horrible disfigurement. When the man removed his hands, he was found to have a brassiere caught in his nose by the hooks. Sadly, there was no explanation for how this remarkable situation had occurred.
The above would have been a great opportunity for the doc to call his pals to come have a look!
Anyone who works in the ED for long has a collection of war stories about foreign object anal misadventure. My immediately previous GF was one such.
Not her but one of her pals had a screenshot of a CT image of some unidentified rectum containing a carrot the size of an adult male forearm. Truly a Carrot Of Unusual Size. And Location. How it came to be there is a mystery for the ages.
I imagine the explanations are almost as funny as the predicaments. At least to the staff.
My one (and thus far only) visit to the ER happened when I was a kid on the farm. One morning my dad and my older brother were trying to get a 600-lb steer into the barn via the walk-in door in the back of the building. The animal was bound and determined not to go into that door, so dad enlisted 7-year-old me to help. My job was to hold a wooden fence panel (about 3’ high and 6’ long) to act as a ‘funnel’ to force the steer through the door.
Well, dad and brother once again herded him close to the door, and, once again, he turned to run. But this time he encountered the panel which I was holding. He attempted to jump over it, coming right at me. I turned to run, but the steer didn’t clear the top, which knocked the panel, and then me, face-first, to the ground. As he galloped off, he planted a hoof right in the small of my back.
I didn’t know exactly what happened, and I stood up without difficulty. Dad grabbed me and carried me in his arms to the house. (In retrospect, not a good thing to do, had I suffered a spinal injury.) Mom quickly drove me to the hospital, where they x-rayed me and determined that there were no broken bones. They treated and bandaged my wound, and mom had to monitor my urine for a couple of days to see if there was any blood from a kidney injury.
Looking back, I know that I was damn lucky. I’ve had no lasting complications, other than lower back pain, but nothing that can’t be dealt with.
These stories!! Glad we all made it this far…many don’t. I have many self owned random injuries, skateboarding and surfing and hitting a deer on my bike… not quite ER level, Im stubborn about avoiding docs too…cept for a few stitch ups.
Weird one a few years back, crossing my apartment with both hands full of dishes, one spoon in my mouth munching, I got my foot stuck in the dogs blanket…as I started to fall(time slowed down a bit) I realized if I didn’t do something, I would fall on my face with the spoon in my mouth, not enough time to empty my hands and grab spoon…so I jerked my foot in the blankets as hard as possible…crack, there goes my big toe. My first broken bone at 55 yrs old!!
Ok Happy New Years Everyone!
This is also a “not me, thank god” story, but it’s a funny “sex sent me to the ER” story. I know that it does sound like an urban legend story, but one of my best friends was on duty as a phlebotomist at the ER where it happened, and I have no reason to doubt him.
Late on a Friday night, a young man showed up at the ER, with laceration wounds around the root of his penis. He was evasive when the ER team asked him about how the injury happened, but they noted that the lacerations are consistent with human bite marks.
A short time later, a young woman showed up at the same ER, bleeding from a head wound. As the ER team cleaned her up, they discovered that she’s suffered numerous puncture wounds on the top of her head, and the wounds were multiple series of four punctures in a line. She claimed to not remember how she received the injury, and was also evasive about her recent activity.
The ER team started to put two and two together, and figured out that the two injured people had been together. Further questioning revealed the whole story:
- The two of them had met at a bar earlier that evening, and then went back to the woman’s apartment for sexy time.
- She began to perform fellatio on him, and suffered an epileptic seizure, which caused her jaw to lock up, and she bit down on his penis.
- In a panic, the man grabbed the closest item – a dinner fork – and stabbed the woman on the top of the head; she passed out.
- Still panicking, he drove himself to the ER, leaving her (whom he had just met) behind.
- She woke up, discovered that she was bleeding from a head wound which she had no idea how she’d received, and drove herself to the ER.
“I’ll have what she’s having.”