Like any job, not every day is the same. And in a doctor's case, not all patients or situations are the same. There are a few cases that surprise them. These doctors reveal the most bizarre thing they’ve found in a patient's body. Content has been edited for clarity purposes.
“I Don’t Know What Possessed Dale To Ingest It All”
“Dale was so obstructed that nothing was passing through his gut. He was vomiting, was in exquisite pain and unfortunately for all involved, was a horrible historian. Dale couldn’t tell us when he last ate, pooped, or when he started feeling bad. It could have been days, a week, or hours. He had no idea.
He was brought to the ER (emergency room) by his boss, a restaurant manager. The boss told us that Dale lived in an adult residence for people with cognitive challenges. A quick telephone call to his facility yielded no additional information except that Dale had no known allergies and took no medications, and no, no one had noted anything ‘off’ about him of late.
Clearly, Dale had peritonitis; he was febrile with a very tender belly and demonstrated free air on abdominal X-ray. Something, somewhere in his gut had perforated, spilling gas and gut contents into the abdominal cavity. And the X-ray looked weird. Stool impaction? Maybe? Foreign body? If so, what would cause that appearance? We were all puzzled, the radiologist, surgeon, and I.
There were no non-surgical options for our patient, so off to the OR (operating room), we went. The usual procedures ensued and the bowel was run — the process whereby the surgeon inspects the bowel for anomalies, damage, and/or perforations, and repairs the bowel. While the surgeon was having fun operating, I got my hands full trying to keep Dale alive and anesthetized. He was sick as poo, septic and hypotensive. I was pouring fluids and pressors into a bottomless pit of hypotension, wishing that my surgical colleague would just hurry up and fix the problem already. But there he was, Sherlock Holmes-ing the bowel.
Then I heard the surgeon exclaim, ‘Holy mole!’
And time just stopped along with my heart.
The surgeon said, ‘What the heck is this? Anne look at this! What the heck!?’
These were not the usual exclamations this surgeon uttered over the surgical field. Alarmed, I peeked over the sterile screen and observed my surgical colleague teasing, then tugging, and finally pulling a poop-encrusted ropelike foreign body out of the colon. And he kept pulling and pulling.
Whatever it was, there were feet, no, yards of it. It was black, slimy, and nasty. After what seemed like ages, the foreign body was completely removed, packaged up, and sent for pathological analysis.
It was three in the morning and now the time had expanded infinitely. We waited for the pathologist to call. Then we heard the phone ring.
I said, ‘OR Two, let me put you on speaker.’
The pathologist said, ‘Hey, it’s Bob here. This is a very interesting case.’
He continued, ‘The foreign body is comprised of two black plastic trash bags linked together at the perforations. The total length is 110 inches. Incidental findings include a carrot and a corn cob both in entirety. Do you need anything else?’
I said, ‘No,’
He said, ‘All right then.’
Then he hung up. Pathologists can be very dry, especially at three am.
To this day I don’t know what possessed Dale to ingest those trash bags, nor can I imagine how that feat was accomplished, let alone how someone could take in an entire corn cob or carrot. All I can say is that Dale was made of ‘hefty’ stuff and we were all ‘Glad’ that he made it.
It Was A Part From The Minivan
“It was the summer of 2001 when I was at Hershey Medical Center. Late one night, we were called for a multiple car incident coming in from the interstate. A minivan had been struck from behind by a semi-truck. Most of the family had been pronounced dead at the scene. A small child six or seven years old had survived and was being stabilized by the trauma surgeons. We were asked to see the driver of the minivan who was a 30ish-year-old and 200-pound male.
He had an open head injury. The back of his skull, just above his spinal cord, had been opened by the impact. We took him to the operating room and in the process of debridement and attempted control of the hemorrhage, I noticed a metallic green object deeply embedded in his cerebellum. This could not be left in the patient but the more I dissected around the perimeter the larger it appeared to be.
Ultimately, it was removed but had severed large draining vessels which were not reparable. The soft plastic bumper from the minivan had been driven from the back of the vehicle all the way into the posterior fossa or in other words, in the skull of the driver. The immense force needed to perform this was nearly impossible to fathom even to this day.”
Hair Ball
“In 2012, a 23-year-old female presented to our hospital casualty at one-thirty am with severe abdominal pain. On detailing the history and performing an exam on her, I noticed that this patient had psychiatric issues which were unnoticed and unattended by her family. It was my job to inform my seniors about the findings of the patient. And so I did. A few investigations followed, like an abdominal x-ray and ultrasound and a few blood tests, to find out the cause of the abdominal pain. Meanwhile, we started symptomatic treatment.
It was strange that nothing really worked and she was shrieking with pain. Almost all kinds of pain respond to analgesia to some extent. This one totally did not. Finally, after the workup, my boss made a diagnosis of trichobezoar, a condition in which patients with clinical depression pluck, eat, and swallow their own hair.
This lady had been depressed for the last two years and had been doing this for eight months that was later revealed. She had eventually developed a hairball in her stomach that obstructed the passage of content and caused severe spasmodic pain in the abdomen.
We had two options from the treatment aspect: Open the abdomen and surgically remove the hairball. But she was a young patient with a psychiatric abnormality, so we kept this one as our last resort. Or use an endoscope to try to retrieve the hairball. This would probably not work because the ball was stuck at the opening of the intestine in the last part of the stomach. We then came up with a third option, something that blew my mind. I had read about it in a book but never heard or seen it anywhere.
My boss asked me to get two large Coca-Cola bottles, two-liter bottles each. We inserted a tube through her nose and into her stomach. We connected the Coke bottle and reversed the bottle mid-air to rapidly transfuse all of the liquid into her stomach in one go. I was left shocked. But she just burped. Nothing happened. Then we picked up the second bottle and repeated the manoeuvre. Nothing happened.
We decided to take this woman for surgery. Just then she said she wanted to sit up. Before I could even reach her, she started puking massively. And guess the content of her vomitus? Hair, hair, and more hair. She kept puking hair for 20 minutes and then she slept, all night, like a baby.
She was kept overnight for observation and sent home the next day with medications to control her depression. Today she is a proud mother of two babies and a regular visitor to my office for consults. She jokingly says that it was a couple of Cokes that saved her from killing herself.
The beauty of medicine: saving lives, sharing lives.”
“It Looked Like Some Kind Of Horror Scene”
“When I was a medic, I worked in the ER (emergency room) one night and this huge dude (maybe 300-350 pounds) came in from a car accident with the paramedics giving him CPR. We got to do our job when it was decided that he would have to go to the OR (operating room) as he eventually went asystole, or in other words, flatlined.
I was new and my knowledge was pretty limited at the time, but I believe they were going to massage this guy’s heart. I was pretty relieved since we were all taking turns pumping this big man’s blood for him and we were beaten. Shortly after he left, I was talking to some of the medics and doctors and they said that it would be a great experience for me to watch it in OR (operating room). So I scrubbed up really quick and went in to watch in the back. They were already about to start cutting this guy open. I watched in excitement as they were cutting through everything when suddenly, blood burst out of this guy like a pot boiling over.
There was more blood than I have ever seen. I remember everyone was getting really quiet, the staff was stepping back as the blood flowed out of him, on the table, falling on the floor, and crept until it got a couple of feet away from me which I was like six to eight feet away. Most of the staff were standing in the lake of blood when it stopped. The surgeons said that it looked like at least three liters of blood that came out of him. It looked like some kind of Japanese horror scene afterward.
Later on, I ended up finding out that upon a closer look at the X-rays, it showed that the man’s poor sternum gave way either from his chest hitting the steering wheel (yeah, he had no seatbelt on), the firefighters, paramedics, or our CPR. The bone had splintered and punctured into his major vessels (aorta, pulmonary vein/artery) so we were pumping blood into his pericardium (heart sac) and that was what exploded when they cut him open. So there was little we could do to save this man’s life. After that episode, I never was bothered by the sight of ‘massive blood loss’ since I don’t think you could see any more than that come out of a person.”
‘Wait A Minute, What’s This Round Structure Here?’
“During my general surgery rotation, I once assisted in a surgery that lasted five hours and the outcome was not what it seemed. There was a 50-year-old lady who was admitted to the hospital. She first presented with abdominal pain that was associated with right lower quadrant tenderness. The rebound sign was equivocal. As she was overweight and without any medical illnesses, we thought it would have been a simple case of appendicitis and posted the case for diagnostic laparotomy.
It was messy as access to her abdomen was difficult. Cutting through the fat was not as easy as it seemed. When we arrived at the peritoneum, we noticed there was generally nothing wrong with it. As usual, we explored the abdomen for any signs of anomalies. The appendix was not inflamed, the bowel appeared healthy, and the liver and spleen looked good.
‘Wait a minute, what’s this round structure here?’ I said.
To our horror, there lied a 20 centimeters by 20 centimeters ovarian cyst in the abdomen.
Frantically, we asked the scrub nurses to call for the Gynecologist on call that day. Within 10 minutes he was in and the operation resumed. Under his skillful hands, the cyst was evacuated in a matter of 30 minutes.
As we reflected upon this case, we realized, we wouldn’t have lost our heads this way if some form of screening was done prior to the operation. Perhaps a simple ultrasound for this lady would have alerted us to this possibility.”
Things Got Messy Real Quick
“I was in charge of the unit the other day, and this happened. We had a patient in the ICU (intensive care unit)who had some big abdomen trauma. He had gone to the OR (operation room) and was too sick to be able to close his abdomen, so we left it open. We had a piece of plastic covering, like a bag, covering his intestines, and then we placed a vacuumed sponge dressing on top of that, called a ‘wound vac.’
The patient’s nurse called me into the room to look at the abdomen because she thought she saw pieces of the bowel seeping out of the bag and getting sucked against the wound vac. I agreed and thought the bowel looked pretty dusky as well, so we called the doctor to come back and look at it.
The resident agreed and talked to his attending who told him to take the wound vac off, tuck the bowel back into the bag it had escaped from, and put a new wound vac on. It all just sounded like it was going to be a disaster, but whatever.
So, the resident came in, took off the wound vac and we saw the bowels had become very swollen from the fluids, trauma, etc. So when he took the wound vac off, they all slipped out of the patient. The bag had dislodged significantly. When we would tuck the bowels in one side, they’d spill out the other. Here we had this guy in his bed, disemboweling and we simply could not get everything back in him, in the bag, or anything. Guts were everywhere.
Luckily, the dosage we had the patient on kept him very nicely sedated and we had other medications to control any problems with his blood pressure. Thankfully, the guy wasn’t overtly bleeding, but it was messy.
We really just had to step back and say, ‘Well, darn. How do we get this guy’s guts back inside him!?’
Ended up having to call in six other people to help tuck things here and there until he could get back to the OR (operating room) for them to get everything back into its proper place.”
Play With Caution
1. “It was a patient who I took care of five or six-ish years ago. He was a severely developmentally disabled 40-ish-year-old male (nonverbal, from a group home) who loved bouncy balls and superballs. You know the kind you’d get in a kid’s vending machine at a supermarket.
He chewed on it and inhaled part of it. Then it got stuck in his left mainstem bronchial tube or in other words, his left lung. It took an almost eight-hour surgery to remove. The surgeon said it was so slippery that it was that hard to grab ahold of it without breaking smaller chunks off.
I’ll never forget seeing the pictures of half of a bright red, bouncy ball lodged in this guy’s lung.”
2. “I recall being in the ER (emergency room) of my hospital and seeing an X-ray of a smallish child’s torso. Neatly situated in that torso x-ray was the perfect silhouette of a small Dodge Viper car, a Matchbox car to be exact. It was perfect. If you’d cut the kiddo open and placed it by hand, it couldn’t have photographed better. He, of course, just swallowed it.
No surgery, but I was thinking that one of his trips to the bathroom might have been a little eventful.”
Thirty Years Later
“I once saw a patient who had a red and inflamed nodule that acutely appeared on their eye. I treated it as an inflammatory nodule but it did not respond as expected. Something told me I should explore this area surgically and when I did, I discovered what looked like a piece of wood under the conjunctiva. I lifted it only to discover that it was an extremely long ‘spear’ of wood about 15 millimeters in length and pointed at one end.
It was buried in the sclera and when I removed it, it left a tunnel but did not perforate the eye. The patient recalled almost 30 years prior being poked in the eye with a broom handle. This must have been a splinter of wood that was buried and began extruding 30 years later. The patient did fine once it was removed.”
No More Grilling For That Patient
“A few years ago, I was asked to see a patient who was hospitalized for fever and severe abdominal pain. Her CAT (computed tomography) scan showed a curved metallic object in her upper abdomen. The only surgeries she had ever had were cesarean deliveries.
I called the radiologist who theorized it was a lost needle from one of those deliveries.
The radiologist said, ‘What else could it be?’
I called the surgeon and we got into a slight contest over who needed to take her to the operating room. He thought I should, while I thought he should, so we both ended up going.
While we were starting the case, I mused, ‘You know, I read something on Facebook yesterday about someone accidentally eating a wire from a grill brush.’
Five minutes later, we removed a wire from a grill cleaning brush. It had perforated her stomach.”
“Coins, Nails, Small Metal Plates, You Name It”
“A man came in, walking gingerly. An x-ray of his pelvic regions showed a couple of batteries. The consensus was a couple of ‘C’ batteries, as that was the type used by this adult toy that he’d managed to shove far enough in that the Gastroenterologists had to go get it. He did go to an OR (order room) for that one.
One of the sadder ones was when I worked in a psych hospital. We had a guy that would eat smallish metal objects. It finally made him sick enough to require medical intervention and that x-ray was so sad. He’d been at it a long time and some of the items he’d consumed (coins, nails, small metal plates, you name it) hadn’t passed and they had to have a surgeon go in and retrieve them. Ended up with a colostomy.”
There Were Several Pounds Of Them In That Little Boy
“Once as a second-year surgical resident, I was doing an appendectomy. This involves making a McBurney incision, a small incision that uses the technique of serially splitting the fibers of the abdominal muscles. You then insert a finger to feel the indurated or harder swollen appendix. Most structures are soft, but an infected appendix feels something like a pencil. The patient was a 10-year-old southern boy. I couldn’t believe it. There were appendices everywhere. There were indurated swollen structures that should not be there.
I called the attending physician who felt the same thing. We opened the abdomen and fully filled a large washbasin with Ascariasis worms. The container was mounded with a pile of moving worms about nine or ten inches long and several pounds of them. That such a small child’s abdomen could contain such a huge volume of parasites was astonishing.”
Constant Headaches
“A guy came into the hospital with three days of headaches out of nowhere. His head’s CT (computed tomography) scan showed a large nail through the anterior skull base, above the nose, and between the forehead.
When asked about it, he had been using a pneumatic nail device a couple of days before. He remembered a moment when he didn’t brace the device right and it rebounded, hitting him in the face. It must have fired a nail when the end hit him in the face and he didn’t realize it. He indeed did have a small wound in his cheek that fit with the story. Luckily the nail avoided the large blood vessels and other critical structures in the brain.
We had to take him to surgery in order to pull it out. Cutting it out of his brain was weird.”
Another Surgeon’s Mistake
“For a while, I worked at a Bush Hospital in a village in an African country and saw some insane things. A 21-year-old woman who recently had a C-section and tubal ligation (a surgical procedure to prevent pregnancy) at a different hospital was brought to us by her family due to her deteriorating condition and because they didn’t trust the surgeon she had seen.
We performed an exploratory lap and found out that she didn’t have a tubal ligation, the moronic surgeon who cut this woman opened had snipped her ureters, not her fallopian tubes. In the end, her health was so poor that even though we cleaned her out and re-connected her remaining (only one was viable) ureter, her body could not heal and she died a few days later.”
They Found Something Odd In His Eye
“About 45 years ago, as a surgery resident, I had to explore the orbit of a young boy, about seven years old, for a stab wound very close to the eye. As I vaguely remember, it was with a screwdriver. Luckily, the screwdriver had missed the eye, so he kept his vision. But while I was exploring the orbit, a BB’s ammo or metallic ball projectiles popped out.
There was no mention of a BB weapon injury in the history given by the family. I explained my findings to his older sister, who was translating for the parents.
She said, ‘Oh yeah, a year ago he thought he’d been hit by a BB, but we couldn’t find anything.’
Did He Get Tik Tok Famous?
“One guy who was trying to get TikTok famous swallowed apple slices whole with no chewing involved. He was really into it, he said he had to use a toothbrush to push in the last few. Got almost a dozen in before they jammed up his esophagus (food pipe). I don’t think he ended up finishing recording that challenge before we had to file him open to clear the obstruction.
Another guy said he had been using sticks to clean out his nose for most of his life. Straight up picking up branches off the ground and using them to scrape out boogers from his nose. Had a raging invasive fungal infection that nearly killed him.”
A Bet Gone Wrong
“We had two men come into reception, one of whom had a snooker ball, or in other words, a billiard ball, in his mouth. The man who was able to speak explained that they’d been at the snooker club down the road and his friend bet someone 50 pounds that he could fit a snooker ball in his mouth. He won the bet then found he couldn’t get it out. We had to sedate him and dislocate his jaw to remove it. Dislocating his jaw and taking the ball out was actually pretty quick and easy, the part that took longest was getting him sedated.”
The Doctor Couldn’t Stop Laughing At Him
“This young male came into the ED (emergency department) complaining of terrible rectal pain. The doctor came into the room with my nurse friend. He somehow visualized inside the man’s rectum and tried unsuccessfully to repress a laugh having to step out of the room. My nurse friend was embarrassed for the patient and excused herself to go out and see what the doctor was laughing at.
He said, ‘I’m sorry but when I looked in his rectum, all I could see was a mustard jar lid that said, ‘SPREAD A LITTLE SUNSHINE”