In Rude Health (6 page)

Medic: But why are you only dressed in a thong, Tam?

Patient: Well, I imagine my clothes were ripped from me as I hurtled down the slope.

[At this moment a member of the public brings over a bag of clothes found in the bushes]

Medic: Are these yours?

Patient: Yes! Oh, how wonderful of you!

Medic: But you said they’d been torn off?

Patient: Well, obviously that kind person must have collected them for me – how nice!

Paramedic, Glasgow

This happened when I was training, part of which involved shadowing a particularly blunt doctor when he was on duty in A&E.

One of the last patients we see has a carrot stuck up his arse.

The doctor comes in (me following), reads through the patient’s notes, and says in a weary tone, ‘So I suppose you’re going to tell me you fell over whilst gardening naked or
something along those lines, eh?’

The patient replies, ‘No, doctor, nothing like that. I’m a sexual deviant, see.’

Consultant, Newport

A young woman thinks she may have broken her ankle, so she dials the number of her local taxi firm. The taxi arrives, and she get in gingerly, saying, ‘To the hospital
please, I think I’ve broken my ankle.’ The taxi driver takes umbrage at this, whips out his phone and dials 999. My colleague gets the call. She asks him to drive the woman to hospital,
which he refuses, shouting that the woman is entitled to an ambulance. My colleague says that she’d love to send an ambulance, but that it would be safer for the woman if she was just driven
there in the vehicle she is currently in.

‘Is that right, mate?’ says the taxi driver, and hangs up. A few minutes later he calls again. In a triumphant voice he says, ‘We’ve got her out! Now, send an
ambulance.’ And hangs up again.

To be fair to the man, he did stay with her until the ambulance arrived, if only to shout at them for not doing their duty.

Call handler, Croydon

We admitted a red-faced sixteen-year-old male who was covered in piercings. He was in because, in a friend’s shed, he’d DIYed a piercing to his frenulum (a bit of
skin just beneath the glans of the penis) and – surprise, surprise – it was infected. His mother had brought him in, and kept saying, ‘I told you, no more bloody piercings, what
did I tell you?’

I was impressed that he’d done it without anaesthetic.

Nurse, Norwich

I was called out on the bike to a man who had been trying to saw a branch off a tree in his garden with a handsaw, unsurprisingly with limited success. Once he’d got
through halfway, and was very much out of breath, he decided the best thing would be to loop a rope around the bough, and see if he could tug it off. So he got his son to climb up the tree and tie
a rope where he’d been cutting, and then started to heave at it. According to the son, the branch wasn’t giving in that easily, so the father had to really put his back into it. Then
eventually, with an almighty crack, he succeeded, and the whole tree came straight down. On top of him, that is. Luckily, his wife’s ornamental fountain slowed it just enough that he
didn’t get completely flattened, but he did have several broken bones.

First Responder Paramedic, London

A muppet presents to hospital with a broken ankle. Apparently he’d had the brilliant idea of strapping a windsurfing sail to a homemade skateboard, then took it to a car
park in 20 knot winds, realised he was going too fast and was running out of car park, so stepped off. Crack.

Apparently the first time he had tried (yes, there was more than one attempt), there was only a very gentle breeze, and he was convinced he was a genius.

The age of this ‘genius’? 35. Thirty five years of age. Windsurfing with a skateboard.

We made sure he told everyone working that shift his sorry tale.

Orthopaedic Registrar, Plymouth

In the days of house visits I attended a guy who had managed to get an orange lodged firmly inside his rectal cavity. Perhaps suprisingly, a not uncommon occurrence. When I
went into the house, he was waddling around in a pair of tiny denim shorts, and no top.

I asked him what happened. He said he had been painting the ceiling when he lost his footing and fell onto the fruit bowl. Now, under certain circumstances (i.e. a fruit with a more invasive
shape), this could be a physically possible if implausible excuse. However, there wasn’t a ladder or paintbrush in sight...

It would be a difficult extraction. At one point, to my shame, my professionalism slipped and I suggested banging him against a table top like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange to see if the
segments would come out individually.

GP, Norwich

In the mid-90s I was helping out in A&E on a busy Saturday night. A guy was brought in from an unofficial rave by ambulance, after having apparently danced so much he
passed out. We suspected a Class A drugs overdose. When he came in, he was wearing an extremely tight pair of white jeans, and he had an astonishingly large bulge down one leg. The trousers were so
tight that they had to be cut off him (he was still unconscious at this point, and we wanted to insert a catheter, honest). After cutting them off, fully anticipating something prodigious, we were
disappointed to discover what the huge bulge really was – a football sock stuffed with cotton wool.

Nurse, Dundee

I work as a specialist nurse in a care home. An elderly lady was in clinic, and I asked her if she could read the eye chart for me, covering her left eye.

Patient: I can’t, dear.

Me: Ok, cover your other eye and read the chart.

Patient: I still can’t I’m afraid, dear.

Me: (thinking for a moment) Can you read, Rosie?

Patient: Of course I can, dear!

Me: But you can’t read the chart?

Patient: No.

Me: Can you
see
the chart (I was getting slightly irritable by this stage)?

Patient: Oh, yes, dearie.

Me: Then why can’t you read it?

Patient: Because I can’t pronounce it!

Nurse, Welwyn Garden City

When I was training, a group of medical students I knew went out on a stag night, got the groom very drunk, and when they got back to his flat decided to catheterise him and
fill the balloon (which lies in the bladder to keep the tube in place) with plaster of paris. The result? The wedding had to be replaced with a very painful operation. Though one of my old friends,
who was a ringleader, still has the plaster mould in his possession. I like to think that the bride-to-be threw it at him.

Consultant Anaesthetist, Durham

Our former district nurse, back in the days when patients were still given baths, was asked to visit a lady who she had not met before.

The unkempt patient answered the door, seemed a little younger than the nurse had imagined and rather confused about the appointment, but appeared grateful to be getting a wash. The nurse
assumed she was an early-onset dementia sufferer.

She gave the rather grubby lady a lovely bath and washed her hair. The patient was overjoyed with the experience, and arranged for the nurse to come back the following week for the same
again.

On returning to the clinic, the Sister in charge asked her why she hadn’t visited the old lady that day. Of course, it turned out the nurse had bathed the patient’s neighbour!

Practice Nurse, Ashton-under-Lyme

As a medical student, I once saw an X-ray showing a rather large watch (I never found out what make) sitting low in a patient’s bladder. Shocked, I asked the consultant
how it could have got there – surely the urethra is too small. The consultant looked at me, back at the X-ray and shrugged, saying, ‘In my profession, you quickly find out that if
someone wants a certain object in a certain orifice, they will make it so.’

Since that day, I have found that to be the case. Although there are limits and perversion is constrained to an extent by orifice diameter.

Saying that, I later found out I had been victim of a common rite-of-passage wheeze where a watch is taped inside the waistband of the patient’s underpants before the X-ray.

A&E Consultant, Manchester

As a new student, I had a placement in A&E – this was in Blackpool, which, being a party town, was quite scary, with lots of drunks etc. I was asked to monitor a
patient for neurological observations following a fall. The gentle man was rather dishevelled and stank of alcohol, and I was new to the job and petrified!

Part of my monitoring included checking blood pressure, reflexes and pupil dilation. I was extremely worried that one eye reacted normally to my pen torch but the other didn’t, so I called
for help and in stepped a consultant. He had been leading some other students around, so they gathered round also, to my great embarrassment.

After a short examination, the consultant stood back, and with a completely straight face announced that the lack of movement was due to the patient being the proud owner of a glass eye!

GP, Lancaster

When I was Sister on the Oncology ward we once had an old man die after quite some time in hospital, just before visiting time. I asked a couple of student nurses to prepare
the body for the family, in other words make him look as natural as possible to minimise their distress.

When they finished they came and told me they felt they’d managed to get him as natural as they could. I went in to his room to check they had done everything correctly. I was astonished
to see the old man sat on the bed, legs crossed, dressed in his pyjamas, slippers and dressing gown, with a newspaper propped on his chest open at the crossword, and a pen clutched in his hand.

Ward Sister, London

A man came in with his penis caught in his fly – apparently his girlfriend had given him a blowjob, and then decided to do him up with her teeth – not the most
accurate of instruments for that task. We got it out with pliers and only minimal foreskin chafing – interesting marks that looked like he’d been gnawed by a pair of hungry gerbils.

A&E Registrar, Falkirk

For some reason people never understand why the presence of a first aider at the scene of an accident only makes us drive faster. Here’s why:

We were called to a restaurant where a man had suffered a suspected heart attack. The notes stated that there was a ‘first aider on scene’.

When we arrived we found the patient fully conscious, but with a huge amount of chest pain. It turns out that when the customer fainted, a customer on the other side of the restaurant jumped up,
shouted, ‘Don’t worry, I’m a trained first aider,’ and before even checking for vital signs started on CPR.

Whilst he’s thumping away with his fist, the patient wakes up and starts screaming, though the first aider doesn’t stop, just keeps shouting ‘It’s all right, mate,
I’m a trained first aider!’ until staff manage to pull him off.

The hapless diner ended up having to spend a night in hospital with three broken ribs. The first aider had vanished, without even paying for his meal.

Paramedic, Dover

A woman came to the surgery during the height of the swine flu panic. I diagnosed her with a mild case of the illness, sent off some tests and told her to go home, rest and
take regular fluids and paracetamol.

She looked at me, incredulous and angry. ‘That’s impossible,’ she said. It can’t be swine flu. I’m a strict vegetarian.’

GP, London

I once treated a healthy young woman who presented with acute onset of abdominal pain and found her to have extensive pneumoperitoneum – which means she had air in her
abdomen.

And where did the air come from? It was ‘Jacuzzi-jet-induced’ she admitted.

Consultant Surgeon, Harrogate

A 19-year-old female came into A&E and I asked her what the problem was. She said that she and her boyfriend were having sex and the condom came off and she wasn’t
able to retrieve it with her fingers. She then went to the bathroom and stuck two fingers down her throat, but apparently she couldn’t vomit it up either...

Triage Nurse, Slough

Working on the call desk of the Glaswegian ambulance service, I got this call from, shall we say, a rather rough area.

‘Alright, pal, I need to get someone to have a look at my leg.’

‘OK, what is the matter with it?’

‘Ah wiz takin a telly oot a flat on Wednesday, right, when ah saw the polis drive up the road, but, so ah thought to mesel, Ahm nae gonna get lifted for this, eh, cause ah’m on bail,
ken, so ah dropped it and jumped o’er a coupla fences and made aff. Problem is, ah didnae see this nail, right, and it did mah leg...’