So far (touch wood) I haven’t had to have anything to disgusting. I was discussing this the other day, when this guy came out with one that made everyone wince.
He was sent for an endoscopy. This is where you have a camera shoved into you to check for something or other. I know a few people who have had this down the throat, to check for digestive problems, or occasionally it goes up the ass when people have bowel problems.
He was having a problem peeing…
Ouch!
Well, I don’t know about disgusting. The procedures you’ve described are certainly uncomfortable, but generally not disgusting. In My Humble Opinion (hint hint) the most uncomfortable medical procedure I’ve ever needed was a simple inguinal hernia check at a routine exam. The most disgusting procedure I’ve ever seen is protected by HIPPA. See you in IMHO.
Did I beat the move to IMHO?
I had a golf ball sized abcess in my throat removed. If you could have seen it you would have immediately vomited. The doctor told me that if it had ruptured I would have died.
Well, for disgusting+ painful I’ll go with an emergency root canal I had… the nerve in my right front tooth had died and was completely septic. When they drilled into the root the nerve materials sort of… dripped out. I could not believe the stench of decay that was coming from inside my own head. ::shudder:: I won’t even get into the unbelievable agonizing pain.
General Questions is for questions with factual answers. IMHO is for opinions and polls. I’ll move this to IMHO for you.
Off to IMHO – with apologies to Czarcasm and TVeblen.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator
The procedure that disgusted me the most was a colonoscopy. Actually, the procedure itself was no biggie, as I was in twilight anesthesia and I don’t remember any of it. The disgusting part was the stuff I had to drink to clean me out. It was supposedly a lemon-ginger flavor, and the only way I could get it down was to hold my nose, gulp fast, and chase it with a sweet soft drink.
ick
Have we moved, yet? I got my bags packed.
Years ago, as a teenager, I had a huge pus pocket in the back of my throat that had to be drained. The doctor needed to give me a shot to numb the area before starting. As the needle entered the back of my throat a blast of orange-yellow pus shot out of my mouth onto the face of a nurse, right on her nose. She stood there stunned as if trying to comprehend what just happened to her then threw up and left the room gagging.
I would find it very disgusting if someone wanted to shove an endoscope down my throat and even more if they wanted to use it for a cystoscopy, but in that case it would be because of its thickness.
The throat stories are makin’ me puke!
Oh shoot, I think Hello Again and YEP have me beat, but this was pretty darn unpleasant for me.
When I was 25, I had a humongous gallstone. We won’t even get into all the trouble I had with my insurance company and the idiot doctor who really, really wanted me to have hepatitis just because I have tattoos and she was going to test me for hepatitis until I had it, dammit. (She gets her own separate rant, but I don’t have enough rage in me at the moment. It was a long time ago, and believe me, I’ve ranted plenty in other places.)
They did two separate procedures on me, first removing the stone and then taking the whole thing out a few months later, lest it happen again. Having the whole thing out was great, except for waking up after the surgery with my sense of reality warped by morphine. I thank Dr. Tsao every day that I can eat pizza and drink alcohol again.
The stone removal (stonectomy?) was a whole other story. The removal itself wasn’t bad except for the icky stuff they sprayed in my throat so they could get the tube down it. The bad part started when I woke up.
They were just finishing the precedure and I was kind of groggy and still had the tube taped in my mouth. I was therefore unable to talk. But I could still make noises, oh yes. Specifically I started farting uncontrollably due to the air they’d pumped into me so they could maneuver in there. OK, that part’s funny now, but it sure wasn’t at the time. I didn’t even know about the air thing until I ripped three or four in a row and the nurse noticed my eyes bugging out of my head.
The really gross part came the next day. Besides the tube in my throat through which they did the preocedure, there was another tube up my nose and all the way down through my digestive system to drain all the bile pouring out of my poor liver, which had been blocked for most of the last month. So, I couldn’t get out of bed without dragging this bag of bile around with me. I don’t know exactly how much bile I’d drained, but it was bigger than my IV bag.
But wait! Did I mention that I have bad sinuses? When the doctor came up to remove my drain tube, it came out, feet and feet of it, covered in a thick coating of icky snot and other stuff. To make the experience complete, when the end of the tube slipped from my small intestine into my stomach, it started whipping around in the larger open space. To top it all off, I didn’t even get to keep my stone, which I was told would have made a nice pair of earrings after they had to split it in half to get it out.
So there ya go… bile, snot, and I got my innards flayed from the inside out. That’s the most disgusting procedure I’ve ever had.
You want TMI!?!? You’re in luck! This is still fresh in my mind!Well, yesterday I had an infected cyst the size of a golf ball removed. Pus was coming out of it for ten minutes as the doc push squeezed and dug with implements of “mass” destruction. The pus smelled, and occasionally she would strike gold and come up with a chunk. When she was done, I was left with a hole 1 inch deep and big enough to shove a Sharpie type marker into. They then pack the hole with a long gauze that looks like the shoelace off a Convers All-Star tennis shoe. They shove one end in with forceps then twirl it like they would spaghetti, until I had about two feet of shoelace inside of my newest body cavity.
I have to go in at 3 today to have them repack me with shoelace. I have to bring my wife with because we are going camping and she needs to know how to change it if it begins to fester. They don’t stitch it.
It hurts like a sunnuvabich. But, like Hello Again, I’ve experienced worse pain.
Not particularly disgusting from a “yech” standpoint, but I had to have some scar tissue removed from my eye and in order to do so they had to numb my eye socket and eye ball. Have you ever had a hypodermic syringe poked into your eye socket? I have.
I’ve had a cauterization in my nose (due to chronic nosebleeds). Basically, they shove a soldering iron up your nose. You can smell the burning of the interior of your nose. It hurts like hell and the Doc gets mad if you flinch or cough, understandably.
MrWhatsit had cancer – a melanoma, I believe – sitting close to his optic nerve, right behind his right (or left? I always forget) eye.
This was before we met, so I wasn’t there, but he’s told me what happened.
They swathed his good eye in gauze, and then, under local anesthesia (!), popped his bad eye out of the socket, stitched a radioactive plaque onto the back of it (having first marked the spot with what MrWhatsit says resembled a Sharpie), and popped it back into his skull.
A week later they repeated the procedure to remove the plaque.
Result: MrWhatsit is now ten years cancer-free, and has the most disgusting story of all time to tell people around the dinner table.
I think my procedure is a lightweight compared to some of the previously outlined medical anecdotes. However, it is distinguished by the fact that it was a DIY job.
I’ve never gone to a hospital to get anything done to me. So, when I had acute appendicitis, I figured why start now? A complete lack of any formal medical training sure wasn’t gonna stop me.
The first thing I figured I needed was plenty of absorbent materials. So, I started a laundry load of towels, making sure to add some bleach to the wash cycle.
Next, I had to hunt up some medical implements. An old science dissection kit provided a scalpel and some tweezers. I figured I wouldn’t need retractors or forceps, since I wasn’t going to be able to see my abdomen that well anyway. I was planning to go in blind and just feel my way around.
So into the bathtub I go, with a stack of fluffy warm towels, a pile of q-tips, three pre-threaded sewing needles, scalpel, tweezers, strips of duct tape, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a bucket of water, some bandages, and a long-neck candle lighter. I figured moving quickly and methodically was the key, and I really didn’t want this to be a multiple session procedure. After a quick swig of vodka, I pop in a mouthguard and lean back.
Taking a moment to admire the smooth flat belly skin, I press down on the scalpel with my index finger and make the incision at the place where my side aches. Droplets of blood appear immediately, but all in all, not too bad. Pain level at 1, but shoots to 3 when I start pulling the skin apart. Separating out a hole through the layers of abdominal muscles wasn’t too bad and for once I’m thankful I have poor muscle tone. I have to be super careful with the scalpel to get through the peritoneal lining. Then, it’s a matter of feeling around for the appendix, using pain as a sort of geiger counter.
Fortunately, the appendix was fairly large and close to the incision, so I take a few deep breaths and fish out a glistening loop of intestine with my finger. Shooting pain erupts, and I stupidly let go and the loop falls back in. I get it out on the second try, but pain immediately shoots to around an 8 and stays there. Good thing I had thought of the mouthguard. I am lucky I didn’t pass out, but it takes me about two minutes to acclimate to this level of sensation. I suspect this maneuver actually dislodged and put pressure on the appendix itself.
Pulling on the loop of intestine until the appendix was out was relatively straightforward. The firm little finger-like appendix was shiny, bright red, and had purply blue lines. I trapped it as close to the intestine as possible with the tweezers. As soon as I start to slice into it with the scalpel, an awful rank smell hits my nose. I persevere and start sawing back and forth to get through faster. It drops off and hits the tub with a wet splat, dripping dark fluid.
Time to move fast now. I decided I wouldn’t be able to hold it tightly enough with the tweezers very long, so I just splash some hydrogen peroxide on the area and douse it with plenty of water. Then, I take the lighter and pass the flame over the cut area to try to cauterize the wound. Not a good idea. It maybe killed some bacteria, but there was no way I could scar the tissue together. So, I have to stitch it after all. I do a pretty lousy stitch job, but at least I pulled it tight. When I let go of the tweezers, it holds.
Ok, into the home stretch. I go through a ton of qtips to treat the area with hydrogen peroxide and rinse. Then I push it carefully back into the gut, and disinfect the skin at the incision with more hydrogen peroxide and rinse everything thoroughly. After lining up the skin, I use copious amounts of duct tape to hold the hole closed. The bottom half of my body is covered with blood, but a quick shower remedies that. The next few days, it’s sore and I have to be super careful when I move around, but after a week, the duct tape comes off and I got a pretty cool looking scar.
Well, I had this infected lymph node in my groin. It was like a large sore bulge that made it hard to sit down. To drain it, the doctor stuck a big needle into it, and I think he went through the vagina. I was dying to see what came out, but he cleared everything away before I got up. Damn.
A staged fistulotomy to repair a transphinteric anal fistula. The name alone is pretty gross, IMO.
It doesn’t compete with an anal fistula or a cyst in the throat, but I had a collection of fluid in the space in my knee joint, then had an injury on top of it which caused me to have bleeding into the space as well. Watching as a syringe filled with cloudy, chunky, dark brown, bloody goop was about the most disgusting thing I’ve ever experienced.
I had a kidney biopsy when I was nine. This involved excising kidney tissue and drawing it into a syringe.
This went fine, as I was heavily sedated. The real troubles came later, when I began passing blood clots the diameter of a dime.
When I was about 14, I had an operation on my eye where baically they take out your eyeball (only a little bit obviously) and they cut the muscle behind the eye, and tighten it and you get stitches in the muscle behind your eye… thankfully I had GA. But for my troubles I had a bloodshot eye for about a month, and now seven years later, it is still not the right colour.
!s Controvert serious?? :eek: