Okay, I haven’t actually been to the doctor for this yet, but I’m planning to go tomorrow. And he’s going to look at me like I’m an idiot.
I think I dislocated my . . . erm . . . ahem . . . [sub][sup]adam’s apple.[/sub][/sup] My friend, who doesn’t know anything, but thinks he knows everything, says that you can’t dislocate it, but you can break it off. I don’t know about that, but I know that my adam’s apple, which has never given me any grief before, is now wandering haphazardly about my throat.
This from a guy who, a few months ago, went to the doctor to try to explain that “this morning I woke up with a cubic centimeter of gunk in a place I didn’t know I had a place.” It turns out I have this weird form of tonsilitis obscure enough that my doctor can’t remember the name which means that stuff normal people swallow just sort of coagulates inside my tonsils. Don’t ask me, I don’t get it either.
So, how 'bout y’all, Dopers? What’s the stupidest thing you’ve gone to the doctor for?
Hmmm… This isn’t really stupid, but resulted from doing something really dumb.
When I first got my contact lenses, I used to sleep in them overnight whenever I was too tired to take them out (which was more often than not). I did this for months without any problems. One day about a year ago, I laid down to take a nap for maybe half an hour. Wouldn’t you know, this one little nap caused me to scratch my cornea. For almost two weeks, I couldn’t open my left eye at all, and could only open the right one when I was in almost complete darkness. I first went to my general doctor who couldn’t see anything wrong with my eyes (barring the alarming bright red color in both). I was then sent to an eye specialist at the hospital who diagnosed me with several scratches in both corneas. I then received stern lectures from the doctor and just about everyone else that had heard of my situation. Needless to say, I don’t sleep in my contacts anymore.
um, well…I’m not sure if you can actually dislocate your adams apple, from this point on known as the thyroid cartilage. It is not truly articulated on any other bone. They hyoid bone floats freely above it, and the cricoid cartilage ring is located below the thyroid cartilage. The thyroid cartilage is the top cartilage of your trachea. If you feel that it may be swelling or migrating, I would consider that important enough to be checked out…
Something that I have come to realize, that I am not sure that every other medical professional has, is that often times people are not really ill, but they want, they need, someone who can take control of the situation and tell them they are okay. I always feel my first and foremost duty is to comfort those who ask my aid, second to heal them.