RFO time yet again

WARNING: NSFW PICTURES BELOW

Seriously . . . very NSFW pictures DO NOT read this in the presence of children. 

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Several people have emailed me over the past two months to ask if I'm ok because my blog has been silent. I thank you good people very kindly for your concern, but I assure you I'm fine. But good lord, you people are right! It's been over two months since I've written anything. Well, that isn't exactly true - I've tried to sit down and write several times, and I now have 10 (!!) posts partially written and sitting abandoned in my "Drafts" folder. And by "partially written" I mean "a paragraph or two". And by "a paragraph or two" I mean "a sentence". Or a title.

Sigh. Writer's block sucks.

It isn't that I don't have material, it's just that lately I don't seem to have the desire to sit and do it for whatever reason. It isn't mentally exhausting to write and it isn't terribly difficult. Hell, I could sit in my car and dictate a blog post if I wanted to. It's just that I didn't want to.

Until now. Because it's rectal foreign object time again!

If I seem excited, it's because I am. Call it macabre or bizarre, call it weird, call it really fucking disgusting if you prefer. But these cases are, well, fun. There's no way around it - they're just fun. And lest you think it's just me, it isn't.

I always worried that it was just me until yesterday, because yesterday I had the opportunity to have an RFO Battle Royale with one of my colleagues, Dr. T (not his real name™).

And I lost.

I lost.

I told Dr. T about my latest RFO, which happened to be a small pill bottle. Wrapped in a condom. Wrapped in yet another condom. Unfortunately the bottle had slipped up way too high and could not be extracted from below. Normally we can reach up (yes, really) either with our fingers or some surgical grasper, grab the . . . thing, and then pull it out the way it went in. But this bottle was so high (like 25 cm high) it could not be reached. So I was forced to enter his abdomen the old fashioned way ("Never let the skin get between you and a diagnosis"), and squeeze the bottle down his colon into his rectum. As I pushed it through, I said to the assistant who was waiting down below to catch it, "Ok, it should be crowning".

If you aren't laughing right now, then you don't have kids, because that's fucking hilarious.

As I related this story (and my infamous Coke bottle story) to Dr. T, he merely stood there impassive with a slight smile on his face, because he knew that he had already won. Apparently those stories didn't even come close to Dr. T's best (worst?). He then told me not his best story, not his two best, but his three best stories, any one of which could beat any one of mine.

Yeah, I lost badly.

3) The third best story starts with "He was bored". Normally when I get bored I read a book or something, but not this guy. Nooooooo. This guy (yes, it's always a guy) put an enormous dildo in his rectum and then lost it. It could be felt from below, but it could also be felt from above. WAY above. Like at his umbilicus (navel (belly button)). Because this wasn't just a normal dildo, it was one of these:

I warned you there were NSFW pictures. I fucking warned you.

Anyway, Dr. T took him to the operating theatre, put him to sleep, and grabbed it from below with a surgical clamp like we always do. There was one problem - if you look at the bottom of that, uh, device, you'll see a little dial. Dr. T, unfortunately, couldn't, because he didn't yet know it was there. I'm sure by now you see where this is going. Dr. T grabbed the dial, twisted to try to extract the object, and turned the damned thing on. Apparently this one didn't just vibrate, it also rotated. After the initial shock and panic, the rotation actually helped free it from its environment and it slid back out to freedom.

One loss.

2) The objects we remove are mostly phallic, for obvious reasons. Mostly. The second best story Dr. T told me involved a bone cutter.

What?

You heard me. Indeed, this man had inserted a pair of metal cooking tongs. I'm sure you've seen them before. You know, one of these:

If you're wondering, he inserted the small end first, "small" of course being a relative term. If you look carefully at the grasping end you'll see a very small gap between the end of the metal and the body of the tongs. As they were being removed, that little gap had been able to trap a tiny ridge of rectal mucosa and was unable to let go, so Dr. T had to use a bone cutters to snip off the tip of the tongs, being careful not to snip anything else by mistake.

Loss #2.

1) Dr. T was almost in tears as he told me this last story, his best. It was another guy who was "just bored". But when he got to the hospital he refused to tell anyone what it was, just that "it" had been there for several hours. An X-ray showed . . . something round. A CT scan also showed something. Round. I looked at a picture of the scan and could not figure out what the hell it could be. It looked to me like the head of a toilet brush:

Dr. T just laughed harder and had to stop to wipe his eyes. No, not a toilet brush. Not even close.

He took the patient to theatre, and once he was under anaesthesia he was able to feel the object. It felt rough though somehow also smooth and supple. Organic, one could say. He couldn't get his fingers around it, and regular graspers kept slipping off. So he tried a larger grasper and was able to gain purchase on it, but then the thing tore.

Shit.

He grabbed it again and tore it again. And again. Finally after several attempts he managed to spear the object, and was able to extract it in its entirety:

If you're wondering, this wasn't a little clementine or tangerine. No, this was a big orange. A really big orange. According to Dr. T, the only thing that allowed him to remove it was the fact that the patient was "a professional".

And with that, tears streaming down his face, Dr. T defeated me soundly.

But I will have other opportunities.

Until next time, Dr. T. Until next time.