In Rude Health (3 page)

He smacks the box down on the countertop. It is filled with slightly off-coloured water, and there is a stringy black thing floating about in it. I’m about to get him signed in, but
something about the ‘worm’ makes me look closer. It was a hairband.

Receptionist, Newcastle

So a patient was admitted to A&E on a stretcher following an overdose of painkillers after being dumped by his partner. After he had been stabilised, I was called to assess
his mental state. I asked if he had taken anything else other than painkillers.

He replied ‘Yes, cannabis and cocaine, but I DON’T DO HARD DRUGS!!’ I love humanity.

Psychiatry Registrar, London

Man comes in with a bad case of gastroenteritis, and by bad I mean
terrible
– he was leaking profusely from his arse, dehydrated, in incipient circulatory shock
and a state of near-constant retching. In the process of securing the diagnosis, I asked him if he’d been travelling overseas recently or eaten anything off or odd. This is what he told
me:

‘Well, I was at a brothel last night and I may have swallowed some water in the communal spa they have there, would that count?’

And I had to treat this guy.

Doctor, Edinburgh

I’m working one of my first A&E shifts after qualifying. A distraught father runs in, carrying a small boy who has a red towel wrapped around his hand, and shouts,
‘My son’s been bitten by a dog!’

Naturally, we rush his son through, thinking we’re in traumatic amputation territory.

In the cubicle, I gently unwrap the towel but can’t see any blood or dampness – in fact, there was only the tiniest of scratches on a finger. You’d almost need a magnifying
glass to see it. I ask him what happened, and this boy, who must have been only about five years old, tells me that he was bitten by a DUCK.

Nurse, Colchester

One of my patients comes to see me complaining of a headache from taking ecstasy. This seems pretty alarming, so I’m immediately accessing her notes with the thought to
send her straight to hospital. As I’m typing, I ask when the ecstasy was taken. ‘I took a pill about two years ago,’ she replies. My typing slows. I ask if she’s had a
headache since that fateful day, to which she says, ‘No, it comes and goes. I’ve noticed that if I’ve been drinking I get it really badly the next day.’ I stop typing, count
to ten, and gently begin to explain to her about hangovers...

GP, Aberdeen

I remember a man coming into A&E for a sore throat, and once he’d waited for three hours and I’d got him in a cubicle, he pulled out some crusty ladies’
underwear and asked me if I could check some stains for DNA, as he thought his girlfriend may have been cheating.

Registrar, Bath

Overheard in the waiting room of an A&E Department:

Nurse: You seriously want to go for a smoke with a collapsed lung!?

NO, NOT TONIGHT, SUNSHINE.

Hospital Security Officer, Liverpool

We had a very drunk but lucid road trauma patient come in one Friday night, bleeding all over the place. We had a hard time examining him because he was thrashing around. He
became particularly upset when my colleague began to cut off his trousers. The doctor asked him what the matter was, at which the man threw himself back on the bed, sobbing, before shouting,
‘I’ve got a really small cock!’

We had to promise not to laugh or stare before he let us continue.

Nurse, Portsmouth

Last year I treated a woman suffering from some quite nasty lateral lacerations on her buttocks. She was very reticent about how she’d come by them. They didn’t
require stitches, so I cleaned them up and put a dressing on; soon enough she was good to go. As she was leaving the cubicle she turned around and said, ‘Can I ask your advice on
something?’ I agreed, saying I’d do my best.

She went on to tell me how she’d been having sex in the shower, and the cuts were from a safety razor that had been sitting on a little shelf. The trouble was, she said, she didn’t
know how to tell her husband. I pointed out that he’d probably noticed when she did, as there would have been quite a lot of blood. ‘That’s the problem,’ she said, ‘it
wasn’t him I was shagging!’

Nurse, Belfast

A man comes to our surgery complaining about his bowels. Apparently his poo usually sinks, but that morning it floated, so he thinks it probably needs checking out. He’s
even brought us a sample in a ziplock bag. All I can do is gaze at him in shock, before asking him to take a seat.

GP, Wrexham

An interesting way to start a day of work: A man comes in to my GP surgery. I ask him what the matter is.

Patient: ‘I can’t stop masturbating in public.’

OK...

GP, Cardiff

A woman arrived at A&E with a nose that had been simply crushed and a pair of black eyes that would make a boxer wince. As I was treating her I asked her how it happened,
and when I found her to be unwilling to talk about it, alarm bells began ringing that her injuries may have been a result of domestic abuse.

I asked her outright if her partner did this to her, to which she shook her head. I pressed her, told her not to be afraid and that we had mechanisms to help, to which she exclaimed, ‘No,
no, you don’t understand! I haven’t been punched – I was head-butted... by my horse.’

It turned out she’d be trying to move said equine’s salt lick, which went down very badly and earned her a nose-to-nose jousting match.

A&E Consultant, Perth

A woman is brought in to our A&E by the paramedics having been found collapsed by the side of the road. When the urine toxicity screen comes back, it is positive for a
whole host of opiates and stimulants. After a while, she begins to come round, but when I offer her a nicotine patch (since she can’t go out to smoke), she refuses, stating, ‘Oh no, I
don’t take anything that might damage my skin!’

Nurse, London

It always amazes me how much fun people have in their golden years. An elderly male came in to the surgery with a steel cock ring stuck behind his scrotum and penis, both of
which were swollen to four times their usual size (he told us with pride). I asked him how long he had been in this predicament, to which he replied, ‘Three days.’

I asked, ‘Why didn’t you come in sooner?’ His answer: ‘I could still pee, and the wife was happy...’

Consultant Urologist, Leicester

Always beware a trained first aider.

A group of friends are walking along a river and come across a man lying unconscious on the river bank. Most of them get on their mobile phones and call ambulances, while one of them, the
Trained First Aider, leaps into action and ‘does resuscitation’. Our ambulance crew arrives to find one man sitting on the patient’s belly, thumping his chest with his fist like
he’s trying to put a nail in, whilst another well-wisher pours water onto the poor bastard’s face.

We thanked them for their efforts, naturally.

Paramedic, Bristol

A boy, about 13 years old, and his mother came into A&E, the mother having dragged the boy in because he was complaining of nasty ‘digestive’ problems. He had
convinced her he was fine, but eventually he couldn’t hide the bleeding coming from his anus.

We took him in for X-Rays and see, clear as day, a large rubber cock, maybe 13 inches in length. The thing had wedged itself inside his bowels, was pushing on the walls of his intestine and had
three days’ worth of faeces piled on top of it.

I took him into a private room and asked if there is anything he wants to tell me before they discuss specifics with his mother. I said that we had found an ‘object’ lodged in his
lower intestine and that it is going to need to be removed surgically. His response: ‘Oh. I may have sat on a marker pen...’

Poor kid, just experimenting with his sexuality. With a 13” black rubber cock.

Surgeon, Oxford.

This happened a couple of years ago. Having cut my teeth in the Royal Army Medical Corps, I have been a doctor for getting on for forty years and there isn’t much that
makes me queasy anymore, but I have to say, this bowled me for six.

I now work as a GP and I was attending to a man, maybe in his thirties, who came to my minor surgery list with what looked like a particularly angry cyst on the top of his head. It was very
distended and painful to the touch, so needed draining immediately.

I embarked on the usual drainage procedure, but I’d only gone so far as to make a small incision when I saw something was not right. There was something moving in there, visible through
the small cut. I made the cut a bit bigger, and there was a huge thorny maggot, writhing about. I grabbed a tube normally used for urine samples, flicked it in and then as quickly as possible
sealed it in a specimen bag, as I knew it would need to be sent to pathology. The patient and I then proceeded to throw up simultaneously.

It turned out that he had been on holiday to Central America, where he must have been bitten by a type of botfly, which laid an egg under his skin. I have never been on holiday to Central
America and, now, never will.

GP, Birmingham

A 21-stone woman came into A&E, complaining of a nasty yeast infection that she’d had for one month (which means it must have been quite the emergency...).

In performing a vaginal examination, I found a condom stuck quite far up, which was probably the root of the problem. To say it stank would be an understatement. After I had removed the
offensive object, she asked what it was.

I told her, to which she replied, ‘Oh, so that’s where that went.’

Registrar, Dundee

A man came in with severe abdominal pain; turned out he had such painful haemorrhoids that he’d become too scared of the pain to crap. Apparently his last defecation had
been about one month previous to him coming in. One. Whole. Month.

He couldn’t tolerate any of the normal treatment for chronic constipation (laxatives and enemas), so he ended up being taken to theatre where I, the most junior member of the on-call
surgical team, had to claw out this monstrosity of a turd with my fingers. It was a dense mass, about 4-5 inches wide, that felt like hardened clay and smelled exactly how you might expect a ball
of faecal matter that’s been brewing in a dark, dank place for a month to smell.

It took a good half hour before I managed to clean him out, all while the nurses tried to stand as far away as possible and my seniors pissed themselves laughing at my various horrified
expressions.

Surgeon, Belfast

A woman came in complaining of a ‘tickle in the back of her throat’ for a week, which would not go away. She’d become alarmed when a strange-coloured phlegm
began to come up with each cough. I took a look in her throat and saw that there was something stuck towards the back of her nasal cavity. Also, her breath smelt like she’d been eating
excrement, though she was adamant that she’d been unable to consume anything for the last couple of days. I managed to get a grip on the object with some long tweezers and began gently to
pull it out – whatever it was had got really stuck to the throat lining behind the tonsils.

Turned out it was part of an edible condom, which the woman had inhaled during fellatio a fortnight previously, but she thought she’d swallowed it.

ENT Registrar, Leeds

Last Christmas, an unconscious man was admitted to our neurology ward, having sustained a head injury linked to a high blood alcohol level. We found him a bed, removed his
suit, and the nurse went to insert a catheter (so he didn’t wet the bed). Suddenly she gasped ‘Oh my, look at this!’ I went over.

Tattooed on his foreskin was a small white unicorn. Sadly, my shift ended before he could wake up, so I never got to ask him for the story behind his magical creature.

Nurse, Walsall

We had a patient who had complications caused by noodles being inserted into his urethra and ending up in his bladder. The surgeon who extracted them said it was the weirdest
looking ramen he’d ever seen.

Nurse, Southampton

I like the story about the guy who inserted a lubed-up lightbulb for sexual kicks and, three days later, had passed neither the lightbulb nor anything else. So they took him
into a cubicle and made him assume the kneeling position, introduced lots of oil and then slipped three Foley catheters, each with a balloon secured to the end, around the lightbulb. They inflated
the balloons and applied gentle traction to the Foleys and waited for about ten minutes until the anus dilated enough to permit the passage of the lightbulb.