For the final post about FBUA (for I am on night-shifts from tonight), I’d like to relate the tale of the doorknob.

A forty five year old male came into A&E with a doorknob inserted where the sun doesn’t shine.

His story was less than original.  Apparently he enjoyed vacuuming his house while naked.  While doing this he had backed up against his living room door, only to have the doorknob disappear up his rectum.  Unfortunately the doorknob was loose, and when he tried to remove himself, the doorknob gave way and thus became trapped up his bum.  Thankfully he got dressed before making his way to hospital.

Cue surgery, and removal of said object, when asked if it caused much damage, the surgeon replied “It wrecked ‘em”.

Bad joke, I know – but that’s surgeons for you, she probably spent the entire surgery thinking that one up.

I vaguely remember two stories – one of a woman who came to our hospital with a bed-knob inserted anally.  The other is of a person who shaves doll heads, swallows them and then gains sexual gratification from passing them in his stool.  This may not be true (I read it on the Internet) , but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were.

Back to blogging about work tonight – and although I can’t promise that the subject matter will reach any great cultural heights, it can only improve on writing about FBUAs.

Way back in the mists of time, when I was still an A&E nurse, the boss of the department asked a colleague and I if we could set up an ‘overflow’ ward.  Although they never said so, I think that the boss realised that if I stayed in A&E much longer without a break I’d either be a drug addict (like one of our Sisters was later discovered to be), or I’d just start killing people out of spite.  So a break would be good for my mental health, and it would only improve my promotion chances when I returned to A&E work.

So my friend and I ordered the equipment, drew up protocols and policies, picked out some of the few decent agency nurses that were around at the time and settled in to become “ward administrators”.  We had a little permanent portacabin to house patients who needed admitting, but that there wasn’t any ‘normal’ beds in the hospital to place them in.  We were an emergency overflow unit.

We had 16 patients, and because of the whole portacabin-ness of the place, we couldn’t have any patients that needed specialist care.  This meant that we had to deal mainly with abdominal pain, chest pain, urine infection and broken hips – that sort of thing.

We also had more than our fair share of patients suffering from mental illness who also had a medical condition.

One patient caused me more than a few headaches, she was a 40 year old female suffering from a battery of mental illness.  She accused staff (including me) of verbally abusing her, she would break the furniture when we weren’t looking and she rarely slept.

Then she got hold of a telephone, and the next thing I knew a swarm of police turned up.  She had told them that she had been raped (thankfully not while in the hospital).  The police, quite rightly, take complaints of rape seriously, so she was interviewed, and a Forensic Medical Examiner was sent to see her.

The curtains were drawn, and the examination started – half an hour later the examiner came to me with a handful of small needles, “did I know where they came from” I was asked.  They looked familiar to me – but also ‘chewed’.  The examiner went back and confirmed that the patient had a number of small pin-pricks in the inside of her mouth.  It was then I realised what the needles were – they were the little lancets that diabetics use to draw blood for their daily sugar tests.

Somehow the patient had gotten hold of a handful of these – chewed them up and then inserted them into her vagina.  The patient claimed that her rapist had inserted these objects when she had been attacked a few days earlier.  These were the exact same lancets that we used on the ward.  The examiner went back and pulled out part of a lightbulb, we had no idea where she had got that from.

There then followed a busy two days as we filled in paperwork, tip-toed around the patient and waited for the police to ask us for statements.

Then, as quickly as she had made the allegations, she told the police that she had made them up.  Cue much relief from me and my staff.

It was only much later that we found out that the patient had a long history of making false allegations to the police and other authorities, and that this was just one reason why she was known to the local psychiatric services.  I can look back on it now as yet another amusing story, but at the time I was incredibly stressed by the whole thing.

This porta-cabin ward was in the newspapers not too long ago, because the heating had failed and two patients ended up suffering from hypothermia.  Still it’s nice to know that the ward we set up is still up and running…

In a way to return the ‘linky love’ as well as to continue the theme – I direct you to this posting from Mr. Ells. (NSFW)  I’ll leave it up to the reader to question “why?”.

So far I have only written about the men who have presented themselves to me with objects d’arse, but this isn’t solely a male preoccupation.  Women also have suffered from the lack of judgement that leads to putting things where they shouldn’t go.

Women seem to stay away from the ecologically sound option of carrots, or even vibrators.

Instead they go for the deodorant bottle, or, and this is slightly scary, glass bottles.

And of the three deodorant bottles I’ve seen up a womans back passage “Mum” was the number one, while the other was a Lynx roll-on style deodorant.

Actually, there was one man who claimed to have ‘fallen’ backward onto a roll-on bottle, luckily for him, there was a Surgical House Officer who had really small hands, and was able to work it loose without the need for the patient to go to theatre.

As a quick side-note – given that vacuuming, cleaning, decorating, dancing or watching the TV naked has such a high incidence of people falling over and accidentally having object inserted anally – shouldn’t the government have some for of public service broadcast?

As mentioned earlier, the other attractive choice is beer bottles, obviously if this were to break while in-situ there could be very serious complications.  I think that the two or three people who have presented to me with a glass bottle inserted were all lucky in that the doctors managed to get the bottle out without tearing the patient’s lower colon to shreds with broken glass.

Why do people do these things?

Tomorrow I shall tell you about the second most insane person I ever looked after, and the things that she did to herself, and the way she made my day really complicated.

It’s not all carrots, as some people have already mentioned in the comments section, sometimes it can be things that are ‘supposed’ (sort of) to be used in such ways.

I was working in Triage in A&E at the time, where my role was to do the initial patient assessment to see how urgently they needed to be seen.  A young man and his girlfriend walked in, the male was in obvious distress and I soon found out why.

The pair had been indulging in ‘sex games’ and they had been using a vibrator.  Unfortunately for the male, his girlfriend had gotten a bit vigorous in inserting it into her boyfriend’s rectum, and it had gotten sucked into his body.

What people need to realise is that there can often be ‘suction effect’, which means that things will just shoot up there and refuse to come out.

Well, being the kind of nurse I once was – I had to have a listen.  So the stethoscope came out, and after being gently applied to his abdomen I could hear a loud buzzing noise.  I wondered how long the batteries would last.

The patient, while worried about his health, was more concerned that his mum would find out that he was at the hospital, and would turn up demanding to know what had happened to her son.  Not wanting to be the nurse who had to explain to an irate mother that her son had a vibrator stuck up his arse, I got him seen as quick as possible.

We got an X-ray taken, and it looked much like the picture here – you could see the circuitry really well, while the ‘body’ of the vibrator was a lot harder to see.

He was booked for surgery, and just before he was about to go the theatres - his mum turned up.

He started off by trying to tell her that he had a generic abdominal pain, but she questioned why he needed to go to surgery for a belly-ache.  So he sat her down in a private room, (provided by me, I may be cruel, but I’m not that cruel) and explained exactly what happened.

To be fair, his mum took it quite well, there was no shouting, ranting, arguing or even sniggering.  Instead she was supportive, if a little bemused.

Myself – I think my mum would disown me…

The vibrator was removed under anaesthetic, and the patient made a full recovery.

I don’t know what happened to the vibrator though…

If you ever need to know how to remove strange objects from dark holes – you can get some ideas here. I particularly like the advice not to pressure the patient for details, as it may be embarrassing.

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.

Given the amount of responses that I got to the post about my mousey guest, I was thinking – maybe I should start up a new blog where I can post dilemmas, and people can put their ideas forward in the comments section about the best solutions.

Then folk could email me new dilemmas for inclusion.

Does that sound like a stupid idea that couldn’t possibly work?  What would I call it?

Maybe I’ll set it up the same time I set up my podcasting idea…

I've read all the comments that people have left on the last post, and I've decided to humanely trap and release the mouse that is left.  It just ran across the floor towards my main computer, where I think he makes his home.

The thought of disease didn’t bother me (after all you are aware of the types of people I see daily), trailing urine across the floor is nothing that I don’t do myself sometimes…

It was the cable chewing that did it for me – if I could trust him not to chew my cables, then he could stay, but he can’t be trusted not to find a Mrs mouse and have thousands of cable chewing offspring.  Also it wouldn’t be fair on my neighbors.

So the trap is loaded with chocolate (and yes, I did use that as an excuse to buy myself a bar of chocolate), and I fully expect to have him joining his friend later today.

To answer a few more comments, he looked bedraggled because he was sweating after being stuck in the trap all night trying to get out.  He was not a FBUA at any point during his captivity, and I can’t keep wild mice in a cage because the stress tends to kill them.

I got the picture of him because I let him run around a plastic tub (the bottom of a paper shredder to be exact) for a bit – for the express purpose of getting a picture of him using my new Macro lens for my camera.

I do still like mice despite their ability to multiply, any race that can give humans a run-around is alright in my book.

If my flat caught fire the rest of the block wouldn’t go up – something I’m very grateful for seeing as people here torch their flats in either drug related accidents, or as a way to get re-housed.

And how did I live with seven nurses?  Well – I was one of them, and I was at work most of the time, or asleep/drunk/shagging for the rest of the time.  Time passed very quickly there…

I have a bit of a problem, first, I’m off work until Friday – so how am I going to entertain you?

“Tell us about things you’ve seen up people’s bums”, I hear you cry.

Alright, from tomorrow I’ll tell you about FBUA (Work it out yourself…)

Ok, now for the real dilemma…

As you may know, I like animals, so much so that when I found out I had a mouse in my flat (he wandered out to the middle of the floor to say hello), I used a humane mouse-trap to catch him.  I then released him near the bins by my flats so he could have plenty of stuff to eat and hide in.

As an antidote to the pictures of cats I posted here, let me post a picture of the adorable little creature that I caught..

Unfortunately it appears that there is another mouse still living with me.  Now, given that I felt really guilty throwing his friend out into the cold, cruel world, I’m of a mind to let him stay in my flat, perhaps feeding him little scraps of food.  I don’t know how he has been feeding himself so far, as all the food in my flat is either in tins, or microwavable containers in my freezer.

I wonder if it could be the same mouse?  He’d have to be very clever to find my flat out of the 200 in my block.  Let alone getting in throught the security doors and climbing up seven flights of stairs.

So my dilemma is, do I let him stay (knowing full well that the council will be knocking these flats down sometime in the near future), or do I catch and release him like his friend, possibly ending up as some cat chew toy?

I’ve got a feeling I’m going to let him stay - just so long as he doesn’t chew any cables, or leave little turds where I can find them.  I mean, I’ve shared a house with seven nurses – one mouse shouldn’t be a problem.

I kept a track of all the times on my jobs during my 'Blogathon' so that I could work out how fast I drive, on average, to my jobs.

The area in which I work has fairly average traffic for London, and while there are a couple of long roads that I can speed down, the majority of the time is spent going down little residential roads, most of which are covered with speed bumps.

In nine jobs, the fastest I travelled was 36mph (a straight run down the A13), the slowest was 18mph (down lots of twisty turny little roads). My average speed was 25.14mph.

Which sounds really slow, but in London the average speed of a car is 12mph)

On average it took me 3 minutes and 48 seconds to get to a job.

My average travel distance was 1.65 miles, the shortest trip was 0.9 miles and the longest was 3 miles.

(On the shortest trip I travelled at 20.5mph, and on the longest I went 26.6mph).

Apologies to anyone who finds such Excel-powered number crunching boring...

I really need to sort out the template of this page so that when a post doesn't have a title it doesn't write "Untitled" in big letters at the top of the post.

What happened today - the full story...

I got a call to a house on an estate in Bow to a 60 year old female diabetic with 'low blood sugar'. No problem I thought, I got there quickly and was happy to see that the flat was on the ground floor. I thought that I won't need my cardiac monitor/defibrillator so I went to leave it in the car, but that was when I heard someone wail. I've written about this wail before, it's the sort of thing you hear when someone is dead...

I grabbed the defibrillator and ran into the house. I was led to a bedroom where I found a very unwell looking Bangladeshi woman, the first thing I did was to check her pulse, as on first impressions, she looked dead. She had a pulse, which pleased me a lot...

Oxygen was given and I checked her blood sugar level, and it was 2.2, which is dangerously low. We have an injection that will raise a patients blood sugar. So I gave that, and within ten minutes she was coming around, the ambulance crew then gave her some sugar and the last I saw of her was her walking out to the ambulance.

What a bunch of heroes...

So, I then wanted to turn the car around to leave the estate, so I drove into a parking space that is guarded by a pole that is folded up when the space is empty. As I went to reverse out of the space I heard a horrible grinding noise and the engine cut out. There was then a strong smell of petrol - So I thought something may have gone wrong with the car.

This pole had lept up catching against the underside of the car, and I later found out that it had torn the fuel line. I think it has some valve in the fuel tank that stops it emptying the whole tank, which is rather handy, or I'd have been swimming my way out.

I was then low-loaded away to Waterloo, because the car is originally one of theirs, when I filled out a ream of paperwork, and stroked the station cat. I then had a Station officer from Newham pick me up to take me back to my station (I caught him singing "Life in a Northern Town" by the Dream Academy, and the "Just One Cornetto" songs on the way back)

When I got back to West Ham the fitters had a spare car, but they wanted to make sure it was safe to drive (they had just gotten it back from a service or something). But then a couple of ambulances turned up which were broken, and they didn't have a chance to check it out - so I sat on station, had a cup of tea and finished reading my book (and very good it is too).

I will be posting more on this later, but after saving a patients life (yay for me), I have now broken the RRU car. Fuel has leaked out over the floor, and I am currently sitting behind Bow road waiting for a truck to tow me away.

I explain more about how I managed to break the car once I have worked it out myself...