As promised, the quality of this blog is about to nosedive, as I discuss some of the things I have personally witnessed up a patients rectum.
I’ve not seen a FBUA (foreign body up arse) while in the ambulance service – I think most people are so embarrassed that they tend to make their own way to hospital rather than risk being laughed at by two hairy armed ambulance people.
The one that sticks most in my mind was the first one I ever came across – I was working in A&E at the time, and I think I’d only been there a year or so, when I saw a load of doctors crouched around an abdominal X-Ray.
“You can see it there”, said one.
“Don’t be daft, but you can see the bowel being pushed out of shape”, another said dismissively.
“Of course you can’t see it”, said another, “It’s organic…”
Being a nosey nurse I asked what they were looking at, and was told that the patient had a carrot up their rectum. Looking closely at the x-ray I could see where the lower part of the bowel was stretched upward by a large amount. There was no sign of the alleged carrot – but then it wouldn’t show up in a normal x-ray film anyway, it being as organic as the flesh that x-rays go through unimpeded.
The story I was told was that the patient was a 72 year old male who had gotten his groceries and was taking a short-cut across the local park when he was ‘caught short’. Desperate to open his bowels, he had dropped his trousers and crouched behind a tree to *cough* ‘squeeze one out’. However, two 15 year old boys ran up behind him, grabbed a carrot from the bag and inserted it rectally.
The patient didn’t want the police involved because he “didn’t want to be any trouble”.
Us professionally trained staff, were of course sympathetic to his plight, and obviously believed every word of his tale.
Who am I kidding, we didn’t believe a word of it. The patient went to have the carrot surgically removed and all was well in the world.
But carrots are a popular thing – it was a year or two later, when I had become much more cynical, that I came across another ‘carrot insertion incident’. The patient was a young male who fully admitted having taken some ‘Ecstasy’, and had been fooling around with a carrot when it had become stuck.
The patient himself wasn’t too bothered because, ever mindful of disease, he had put a condom on the carrot.
So I think the government is giving our youths the wrong message when it tries to dissuade drug use. Instead of the dangers of overdose, heart attacks and reduced sexual function, they should just show a picture of someone putting a condom wrapped carrot up their arse while thinking it’s a good idea.
