Tangential to the thread, but OpalCat, you have to sell the piece of your tailbone that is removed on eBay so that at long last there is a verified, factual answer to the question of how much it costs to get a piece of tail?
Back in May, I broke my leg. It was a skateboard accident, but I’d fallen so badly I had managed to get a discplaced break of the tibia down by the ankle and a complete, closed break of the fibula close to the knee. An ambulance was called and I was brought to the emergency care centre.
There, the kindly (bald-faced! lying! bastard!) doctor told me he’d have to put the leg in traction to get the bones to align properly. Now, if you’re playing along at home and googling the words “medical traction,” you’re getting nice pictures of people with wool-stuffed pads on their legs, tied to a pulley.
Pussies.
In Norway, apparently, the practice is what we call “skjelettstrekk.”
Skeletal traction. Do you see where this is going?
There I was, lying in the hallway, when I suddely see the janitor coming up to me. Well, I assumed he was the janitor, since he’s carried a hand-drill with a long-ass bit. I thought it was funny that he was wearing a white coat, though and he also had a syringe. And something that looks like a stirrup. And metal wire. And a five-pound weight. He smiled. I was not comforted.
A few more words about the drill are appropriate. Black & Decker never made anything like this. It looked this and seemed absurdly out of place in a hospital.
Also, the drill-bit was 15 inches long.
Without any ado that I remember, Doctor Handyman proceded to grab my leg and yank it. For my part, I started seeing the Aurora Borealis, indoors. Then he stabbed my leg with a syringe. Specifically, the heel. At this point, my brain was going “Wooo! Drugs!” because the dose of Ketorax I’d been given in the ambulance had pretty much worn out. Bummed by the fact that it was just a minor local anaesthetic, my brain proceeded to watch without any inkling to what was coming next.
That was, of course, the part where the doctor drilled straight through my heel with a manual hand-drill. I could see the drill bit going in and then, hot damn, I could see it coming out on the other side. He then detached the drill bit. Scoffing a bit that it was too long, he then produced a pair of Og-damned bolt cutters and cut it down to size. At this point, my brain had already decided it was watching Tom & Jerry and turned off any higher functions. Then he attached the stirrup to the piece of bit sticking out on either side of my heel, looped the wires around on either side and attached the 5-pound weight to it. And left.
And that’s pretty much how I spent the next 36 hours, until I could get a titanium plate and some screws implemented in my leg. I am now aproximately 5% Wolverine and cause mayhem at security checkpoints wherever I go.
I had that, too! Though, in my case, it was due to an injury…I’ve taken a disproportionate number of blows to the face, 3 requiring surgery - that one, falling on a set of stairs, and…well, knocking myself out…beyond that, I’m not sure…I have a scar between my eyebrows from it…and…getting knocked out by a swing.
meenie, yes I’m hard of hearing. (moderately severe loss and wear hearing aids) I do have normal outer ears, although the ENT who did the surgery (who was THE best pediatric ENT in the world) said 99% of the time there’s no outer ear.
This scared the hell out of me; I’ve had four surgeries for oral cancer and the possibility of a neck resection was discussed for the latest one but it wasn’t necessary. Now I know what I might have to look forward to.
Congratulations on your recovery.
LouisB, thanks. It really wasn’t that bad. The tongue surgery site hurt (and then annoyed) a lot more than the neck stuff.
I recently fell down the stairs and had the knob on the top of my left wrist bone break off and come to rest about two inches from the top.
The docotr worked it back up the top of the bone. Then he put little suction cups on my fingers that were connected to wires and a machine. He pressed a button on the machine and the wires tightened, putting my tendons back into place.
Of course, they had shot me up with a painkiller, so they could have chopped my arm off and I probably wouldn’t have complained.
Machine elf, I wasn’t going to post but I had to, in sympathy and horror.
And since I did, the only surgery I have ever had was to correct Lazy Eye. The doctor stitched up the muscles on the outsides of both of my eyes; I was blind for a day and had to wear dark sunglasses for several more.
I swallowed a camera which took pictures inside of me for 4 hours. The pics were transmitted through my body to a unit I carried in a belt I wore around my waist. They put 4 big sticky pads on my stomach which picked up the pics. I don’t know what became of the camera, guess it ended up in the toilet. The camera was the size of a big pill. This is called capsule endoscopy.
That’s surprising; I would have thought the neck thing would have been much more painful. Although, I had a good chunk cut from the bottom of my tongue and then stitched up. It hurt enough to suit me. Living on soft and liquid food was annoying.
This thread has some really interesting stories, but I have to admit to reading it in utter terror some of the time. Yikes, you guys!
I don’t have any stories about medical procedures, but some good ones about not having medical procedures. I went through a fairly severe bout of malaria without spending more then ten minutes in the hospital to confirm my diagnosis. I also had some broken vertebrae that did not get any special treatment.
Is a donor nephrectomy considered unusual? People get kidney transplants all the time, but it didn’t seem normal to me at the time.
I had a small piece of plastic removed from my ear canal by an ENT specialist after an urgent care center and the emergency room lacked the appropriate tools. It happened Friday night and the piece of plastic stayed in there all weekend.
The piece of plastic in question was that which plugs up the end of a simple mass-produced ball-point pen with removable cap, and is not removed in general use. I was playing with the pen and my ear itched, I stuck the pen in to itch it, and the plug came off and stuck in my ear canal. It might have been able to be retrieved by simpler methods, but I kept doing things that pushed it further in.
Yeah, it wasn’t a real smart thing to do. I’m not going to admit how old I was when it happened.
I had major spinal fusion a few months prior to my 10th birthday due to a really weird ortho problem that caused amazing scoliosis; what was unusual was that due to complicated reasons they couldn’t really straighten me much, not enough to install the usual rods, so they basically packed the fusion with bone. I don’t know if it was all mine but I know some was taken from my pelvis, probably with terrifying medieval instruments; orthopedists love terrifying instruments. As was found by whoever it was upthread with the broken leg. I don’t want to know if it wasn’t all mine and I don’t have a copy of the operation report so I can’t find out anyway. It’s worked fine. They did good work.
I don’t know if they’d do it differently now, but this was in 1986. I’m glad it was then. I don’t want to think about going through that now, because I breezed through it as a kid. I was told they (jokingly, I presume) wanted to take me upstairs and show me off to the adult ortho patients.
Now I’d be one of those adult patients who would start planning exactly how to kill that little brat, if I could just get out of bed without blinding agony of various sorts.
I had a similar surgery for scoliosis in 1992. I got the Harrington rods after they removed three disks and fused four vertebrae. The "packing with bone " thing was the standard at the time. I know they used a graft from my pelvis and donor bone from a cadaver. They also removed a rib so they could align me a little better. I’m not sure if that went into the fusion or not. Then they wrapped the whole thing with wire so it looks kind of like a bundle of sticks with some big ugly hooks at the ends. The rods are obsolete now and I don’t know what replaced them.
The weird part of the story is that the scoliosis was found two years earlier on the same day they found my cancer. I had been having some discomfort in my left side and my Mom took me to the doctor. He said it was just a pulled muscle and to go home and rest. Two weeks later my side was hugely swollen. When we went back to the doctor he sent me over to the local ortho clinic for some x-rays. They told me I had severe scoliosis that would require surgery and there was a strange shadow in the x-ray that they wanted to check out. We went across the road to the main hospital for an ultrasound and CT scan. A different doctor came out and said that I had cancer.
I had stage four Wilm’s tumor. It had destroyed my left kidney and spread to my left lung. I, of course, lost the kidney and the lower lobe of the lung, along with a rib. Apparently my case was extremely unusual. Most Wilm’s patients are between 3-5 years old. It’s rare that it forms after age 8. I was 12. I had always been overweight. Everyone thought I was just getting really fat that year. Turns out I had a tumor the size of a watermelon in my abdomen. It took two nurses to carry it down to pathology.
I found out afterward that nobody had expected me to survive. They told my parents to look into funeral arrangements for me. I was pretty much born angry at the world and somebody told me that I must have been too full of piss and vinegar to let go of my life. 
It took a long time to get better. Chemo and radiation sucked. Then, when I finally started feeling alive again, they decided it was time to chop up my spine.
I had a cyst removed from my neck in Japan. Without anesthesia. We started with a local anesthetic, but it wore off fast. Meanwhile, the Japanese doctor was trying to get his staple gun to work. He finally gave up on it and just sutured me up. You would not believe how painful it is to get a needle and thread drawn through your tissue, over and over. When I went back to him later for a follow up, he giggled and asked “Do you remember when you said ‘JESUS CHRIST THAT HURTS!!!’?” “Oh yes,” I said. “I’ll never forget it.”
A few years back, I had one of my cervical vertebrae removed. It’s called a corpectomy. This was due to severely ruptured disks both above and below the vertebra, which were exerting ‘mass effect’ on the spinal cord. The vertebra was replaced with a metal plate attached with four screws and a piece of donor ‘cadaver’ bone. So, yes - I have the bone of a dead person residing in my neck…I like to call him ‘Bob’.
Bob and I did well for the next few years, but about a year ago, I started having some neck pain again. I wanted to make sure that everything was still in place, so I went to the clinic and had some X-rays taken. Well…try to imagine the look on my face when I looked at the X-rays and it was clear to see that one of the screws had completely removed itself from the plate and was just sort of floating freely in my neck! :eek:
I went back to my neurosurgeon, x-rays in hand to show her the problem and see what, if anything, could or should be done. She just shook her head and advised me that it was far more likely that any correction or removal of the loose screw was likely to cause more problems than it cured. She advised me to do nothing. If in the future, it seemed to be causing more problems, we could revisit the issue.
Well, the pain in my neck had subsided by then, so I took her advice and did nothing. No further problems have surfaced since then.
The fun part is, I am now one of the few people in the world who can actually prove from a medical standpoint, that I have a ‘screw loose’!
My husband had to have an entire second set of adult teeth removed that were growing in behind he first set.
Yes, like a shark.
And one of my friend’s Mom’s has had multiple surgeries to remove extra organs, presumably left behind when she absorbed her would-be twin in utero.
Once Ramadan is over, I am going to have a CAT scan of my brain “with contrast.” It seems the tumors in my head are impinging on my optic nerve, damaging my vision. If we confirm that we might want to consider surgery.