Foreign Bodies
I suppose my first thought goes back to a trip as a student nurse to one of the London Hospital museums. I remember lots of glass cabinets filled with kidney stones, a massive ball of hair retrieved from a womans stomach and an Alka Seltzers bottle, these are other peoples stories…
So in my working time I have removed more beads, buttons and sweets from childrens noses and tips of cotton buds from peoples ears than I would ever want to recall, however occasional something atypical makes you want to stop and think “ooooh, but why?”
As a student nurse doing paediatrics I remember a girl being admitted for what we jokingly referred to as a Dolphinectomy. Apparently she had sat on her toy wind up dolphin in the bath and had somehow managed its way past her sphincter – (likely story) Xray showed the metal of the wind up mechanism just inside her descending colon. Thankfully she managed to save herself from said Dolphinectomy by one rather painful bowel motion. (Whether or not the dolphin swam out to sea or ended up in a museum is unknown to me – hopefully it is not back in her bath!)
As for likely stories… the thirtysomething gentleman who showed up in our ER a couple of years ago with a rather impressive rectal FB (a full-sized aerosol hair spray can) told the triage nurse that he’d awakened to find blood in his stool, and was attempting to examine himself with a hand mirror and said can, when POOF! the can became a rectal foreign body. Riiiiiiight.
Erica
March 22, 2007