Medical Professionals, What Embarrassing Sexual Injuries Have You Witnessed?

In My Humble Opinion
81

We proceeded to the OR. The nurses swabbed his belly between his bellybutton and his pelvic brim, and surrounded it with folded green towels. Psycho Chief, who had scrubbed at last, took the scalpel, and made a mini-incision down the midline from umbilicus to suprapubic. He handed me the retractor, and I pulled the incision wide.

And there was the colon. With the Brut bottle bulging in it. With the cap of the Brut bottle pushed up against the thinning unhappy wall, so hard you could almost see its details. Clearly in a few more hours, that thing would have ruptured from pressure necrosis. If hours. Maybe minutes.

Psycho Chief took hold of that rectosigmoid as delicately as if it was a baby’s arm, and ever so gently pressed on the deep end. The Brut bottle resisted, but its cap slid away from the thinned-out wall, and in moments he had it moving. He shoved it and shoved it and shoved it until Spider, who had her hand up underneath the green towels in the guy’s ass, cried in excitement, “I feel it! I’ve got it! Keep pushing!”

Psycho Chief set to with extreme intensity and focus, Spider reached deeper, both of them cussed like people obsessed, and, moments later, Brut Hombre’s asshole gave birth to a Brut bottle.

It was a beautiful moment. I still get tears in my eyes.

Psycho Chief instilled methylene blue into the colon to see if it would leak, because if it did all our efforts had been for naught, but it didn’t, and we let the colon go back into its place, and he sewed up the mini-lap.

Then Pathology insisted we send them the Brut bottle, as it had been removed in the OR, and Psycho Chief wrote them a request form that was a miniature symphony of scathing sarcasm.

Spider congratulated everyone and went away to go to bed, and I went off to do whatever it is interns do at 3:00 in the morning.

Brut Hombre was able to go home late the next afternoon, with a neat row of stitches from his bellybutton to his pubis.

82

I last saw Brut Hombre two weeks later in clinic. I didn’t recognize him - I had seen very little of his face, after all. I said in my bored clinic voice, “What brings you here today?”, and he went beet red from his collarbone to his hair.

I stupidly cried out, “Oh, it’s you!” I still wonder how he survived without death from embarrassment.

I took out his stitches, steristripped him, and sent him on… and nothing survives now but the story.

Unless there is some pathologist’s report, greying in microfiche somewhere, from the year 1987, on a feces-encrusted Brut bottle.

83

TDN, skepticism is a virtue. Particularly on these Boards it is. But if you think I could make all that up…

with all those details…

at that level of ingenuity…

my hat’s off to you.

Maybe my hat’s off to myself.

It really happened.

gabriela, telling the truth

84

Concur, although a diagnosis of renal failure should not be reached solely on the basis of elevated K. I’d want to see the rest of the patient’s bloodwork before I hooked him up to a dialyzer. And most definitely a nephrology consult.

85

Actually, with a reasonable knowledge of medicine, I would expect a writer to be able to make up such details.

Not that I think you did - but I’m just saying the details aren’t in themselves reason to believe the story’s true.

86

Hey, I’m a writer, and I couldn’t make that up.
But there are a lot of writers on these boards a whole lot better than I am.

87

Ah, The Onion-a story for every occassion:

What The Hell Did I Cram In My Anus Last Night?

88

So howsabout you look at my previous question and explain that bit about potassium and respiration over again? Because I wasn’t quite clear on what Dr Demento was doing in that circumstance.

89

A number of my incarcerated patients seem to enjoy whiling away their time stuffing things up their urethra. Apparently this is more challenging, and more small objects are available for this hobby.

Items removed from the bladder or urethra via cystoscope from patients at my institution include ball point pen springs, ink cartridges, dental floss, a broken toothbrush handle, pencils, parts of eyeglass frames, and ramen noodles.

One patient, before he was incarcerated, managed to shove a whole bunch of speaker wire into his bladder, where it promptly got knotted up and couldn’t be extracted. That resulted in surgical removal. This experience did not prevent him from later shoving a plastic coffee stirrer up there.

One gent had done so much urethral manipulation that he caused scarring, which resulted in acute urinary obstruction due to his urethral meatus essentially closing off. His stream got narrower and narrower and peeing took longer and longer until finally no more would flow. He needed aggressive urethral dilation along with steroids to reduce swelling and re-scarring.

For too long, the topic of urethral stuffing has been ignored on this board, in favor of the more pedestrian rectal stuffing anecdotes. But Rectal foreign bodies have become so common that emedicine.com has a lovely review article: http://www.emedicine.com/EMERG/topic933.htm. Sadly, emedicine makes note of urethral and bladder foreign bodies only in passing.

90

Excalibre - can you lighten up? gabriela - that was brilliant. Great story. Well told. Bravo.

91

Are you sure this wasn’t one of the hospitals near to Brooklyn, rather than Brooklyn, proper? My father had some rather negative experiences with an institution two rivers away that sounds like it would be a candidate. (Neglecting to x-ray an 84 year old woman’s leg after an automobile/pedestrian accident seems just a bit like something that Dr. Demento might have done.)
Did you ever see the Path report on that Brut bottle? I am more than a little curious as to what assays, and cultures, they’d have done. (For that matter, I suspect that any Path team that silly/stupid to insist on the Brut bottle in the first place would try cutting it open for a good sample - which would have let them go to the ER, too.)

92

Wait, what? What’d I do? I was just hoping she’d elaborate on a previous post I was confused about. I didn’t mean anything bad by it.

Do I need to start adding smileys every time I’m not expressing overt hostility?

:stuck_out_tongue: :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley: :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley:

93

They put what in their where! People willingly do that?

Last time I was tested for STD’s the doctor gave me a penil swab. Basicaly putting the head of a q-tip in. It was unbeleivably painful. He gave me his standard request of please don’t punch me when I do this. I asked how often he got punched. He said not often I’ve gotten good at dodging.

94

Oh, for pity’s sake, it doesn’t hurt THAT much, unless you have a very hamfisted doctor or he’s using an incredibly big swab for some reason. Are you serious, he’s using a standard issue Q-Tip? My doctor uses a tiny swab (obviously made for that purpose) and it just burns a little.

95

[mumbles]glass thermometer[/mumbles]
Don’t ask me why, 14 year old kids might be the stupidest people on the planet. At least I never lost it. Although damned if I didn’t come close.

For further evidence recall if you will SPOOFE’s misadventure. Well, that was posted many, many years before you time but there definitely seems to be a lack of forethought in those years. Drunk people probably are worse though. Ahh life, it’s never so bad it can’t get worse.

96

It’s actually a bit prosaic. A friend of mine and I were having a discussion regarding an apparent rash of cases reported via the Russian military rumor mill of individuals having sexual relations with heavy ordinance. Artillery barrels, rocket-launcher tubes and the like. Some of these rumors involved the injury of the individuals, as the weapon mounts were stabilized against vibration, and responded forcefully to being pushed.

Now, this has the strong odor of urban legend to it, as violating the barrel of your battle tank may be considered analogous to violating the troop’s horses, and meriting similar karma. However, the conversation soon turned to what other autoerotic injuries may be found. I was of the opinion that practically any combination of nouns plus “autoerotic fatality” would yield a hit somewhere.

The ‘hydraulics’ part was from another discussion involving a robotic tentacle recently developed by DARPA. Likewise, the poetry was from a discussion on the mental state of a person who develops a (one-sided) loving sexual relationship with an inanimate object. Granted, that discussion referred to trees, but a John Deere tractor is a better example. Somewhat similar to the Geek Hierarchy, even the biggest perverts in the world need someone to look down upon. In this case, they look down upon the tree-fuckers. The tree-fuckers, likewise, separate into two groups. One group that claims to only use the trees as a masturbatory aid. They look down upon the other group, which claims a deep emotional connection to their leafy lovers.

DARPA, tentacles, autoeroticism, arborphilia, and poetry eventually caused a PubMed search on autoerotic fatalities involving power hydraulics. Unfortunately, my institution doesn’t subscribe to the Journal of Forensic Sciences backfile, so I couldn’t get a copy of the full article. I shall press the medical library to acquire this subscription.

97

It’s not just the cunt muscles. They get a helping hand from the pelvic bone, depending on depth and angle. It’s the difference between cracking a walnut with your bare hands, and cracking it by squeezing it against a pebble. Sorta. Never happened to me.

It’s time I had a new sig line. Might I trouble you for this one, please?

98

Sorry, Excalibre - I went to bed last night before you posted this.

I have streamlined the Dr. Demento list partly through failing memory and partly because it wasn’t germane to the story. Which was already very long. Dr. Demento told us about the list himself, with a goofy look. When he was an intern he had several tests named after him that basically proved he was the worst intern in the hospital.

The tests only make sense if you ignore the units. Normal sodium, ignoring the units, is about 137-145. Naturally normal blood pressure has a systolic (upper) measurement of 120, but all our sick patients at UHaul were hypertensive, so they ran 140 to 180 all the time. So if the sodium was 150 or 155, the person had either been neglected by the intern, or given vastly the wrong IV fluids. You would think no nurse would collaborate, and you’re right; in terrible hospitals like UHaul, young docs like me often hung their own IV fluids. (As well as drawing their own blood, starting their own IVs… hospital drew the line at taking their own Xrays)

And the potassium one is much worse. Normal potassium is fairly tightly regulated between 3.5 and 4.8. These numbers vary a bit depending on your hospital lab, but that’s a decent range. You can get down a bit low (3.3, even 2.9) without serious consequences, but too low and your heart skips beats. Too high is even worse for you; you can die from it. Which is why some lethal injections used to be pure potassium.

And normal respirations are anything from 12 (in deep sleep - you just try breathing 12 times a minute) and about 20, assuming you’re not excited. In one really bad hospital where I worked every patient always breathed 20: that is, the overloaded and overworked nursing assistants in charge of the vitals wouldn’t actually count respirations; they just wrote down the magic number. Or copied from the previous shift…

If you have a potassium of 8, and respirations of 7, you are at death’s door. And if you got that way in an ICU, your doctor is seriously bad. So it was funny that Dr. Demento told us this particular measurement was named after him. Not funny for his patients, but funny for us.

Of course potassium alone doesn’t prove you’re in renal failure - acute renal failure being only one of many causes of high potassium - but I streamlined the measurements for the sake of the story.

That was dull.
Next time I’ll bore you by e-mail.

99

Oh, you can do better. Much better.

100

Ah, the varied interests of the Dope.