In Rude Health Read online

  First published October 2013

  Freight Books

  49–53 Virginia Street

  Glasgow, G1 1TS

  www.freightbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Robbie Guillory 2013

  The moral right of Robbie Guillory to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or by licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-908754-33-2

  eISBN 978-1-908754-34-9

  Printed and bound by Bell and Bain, Glasgow

  Contents

  Cat and Mouse

  The Eyes Have It

  Bottoming Out

  Miracle Cure

  Chilli Con Vagi

  Speed Dogging

  Funny Games

  Buried Treasure

  Beardbugs

  Premium Call Rate

  Currant Affairs

  Turd Time Lucky

  Not Getting Through

  Stuck in the Middle of You

  Fire in the Hole

  Taking the Plunge(R)

  Foiled Again

  Well Fly

  Weighty Pronouncement

  A Good Lay

  Seed Potato

  Concrete Thinking

  Full of Beans

  Stuck on Repeat

  Frank Exchange

  Love Buzz

  Rash Behaviour

  Early Bird

  Just Say No

  Running Gag

  Fowl Play

  Coming Up Slowly

  Stained Reputation

  Dying for a Ciggy

  Small World

  Shaving Face

  Shit Happens

  Handy

  Horsing Around

  My Body is a Temple

  Golden Balls

  Killing with Kindness

  X Marks the Cock

  Maggot Brain

  Lost in Space

  Shit Scared

  Johnny Come Lately

  Mythical Beast

  Miso Horny

  Seeking Illumination

  Please Release Me

  Loose Nuts

  Suck it and See

  Grapes of Wrath

  Out of Puff

  Deep Throat

  Arse-on

  Mandible Mayhem

  Rip You a New One

  Toeing the Line

  Lancing the Boil

  Backed Up

  Nooks and Crannies

  Hiding to Nothing

  Burned to be Wild

  Burst Springs

  Muddy Waters

  Eye on the Ball

  Patched Up

  Stairmasters

  Come Again

  You Know What They Say

  Milking It

  Tap on the Head

  Fence Corrective

  Ankling for Trouble

  Rip it Up and Start Again

  Root of the Problem

  Pasta Joke

  Read the Label

  Diminished Responsibility

  Thong Place at the Thong Time

  Raw Honesty

  Taxi-ing Situation

  Bobby Dangler

  Out on a Limb

  Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands

  Pants on Fire

  Put a Sock in It

  No Eye Dear

  Ship of Fools

  Bathing Beauty

  Tick Tock, Up My Cock

  Shedding Light on the Matter

  Still Life

  Blown it

  Fist Aid

  Meat is Murder

  Suffer a Jet

  Anatomy Lessons

  Nailed

  Blade Runner

  Introduction

  We are sick. We are dirty, kinky and sexually dysfunctional. We commit stupid acts in the heat of the moment, play with tools we don’t know how to use, and generally hurt ourselves – a lot. And when we aren’t suffering from some awful internet-trawled illness we are totally convinced that we are. Luckily for us, we have the National Health Service on hand to pick up the pieces.

  The NHS is a beautiful thing. A free healthcare system, visible proof that we live in a society that looks after its citizens. A health service where you can get treated for whatever you want whenever you need it, day or night. Be it an eel up the arse, or an urgent case of blue legs, our highly-trained health professionals are on call.

  This book is full of the very best stories gleaned from those at the frontline, a collection of the weirdest accidents and patients they have attended, the ones that keep them smiling through a seventeen hour shift, or at least get them in to work the next day. A&E is a common spawning ground for these outlandish tales but the net was cast wider, to dentists, GPs, ambulance drivers, midwives, call handlers, first responders and the like.

  As one would expect, all stories are supplied anonymously – to protect the innocent as well as the guilty. I’m hugely grateful to all those NHS workers who gave me material, tales that made me both laugh out loud and sometimes weep with despair... But, most of all, hearty thanks go to the Great British Public, whose imagination and inventiveness in finding methods to put itself in harm’s way knows no bounds. For your perversion, stupidity and ignorance – I salute you.

  Robbie Guillory

  Cat and Mouse

  An unconscious 30-year-old man was brought in to us by ambulance. His girlfriend had found him lying naked on the floor of his bathroom and called 999. Upon examination, he was found to have a large lump on his forehead and, strangely, several scratches on his scrotum. The lump was obviously from a fall of some kind, but we couldn’t work out the cause of the scratches until he’d woken up.

  He said he had been cleaning his bathtub while naked, kneeling on the floor beside the tub. His cat, apparently transfixed by the rhythmic swaying of his scrotum, lunged forward, sinking its claws into this deliciously pendulous target. The man wasn’t sure what had happened next, but clearly he’d jerked forward to protect his package and cracked his skull on the edge of the bath.

  A&E Consultant, Milton Keynes

  The Eyes Have It

  A few years ago I was working nights at an inner-city A&E in Manchester. A man staggers in, clearly the worse for wear drink-wise, and tells the front desk that he can’t get his contact lenses out. Apparently they would come halfway out but then always snap back in again, and were causing him agony. A nurse attempted to get them off with a suction pump but to no avail, and the patient was getting more and more panicked, so they called me in to have a look. I checked both eyes, twice, but couldn’t find any sign of lenses. The man had been trying to rip out his own corneas.

  Doctor, Milton Keynes

  Bottoming Out

  I remember a case where a man reported to his GP complaining of severe constipation, and quite considerable pain. After some persuasion he revealed that he and his boyfriend had been getting into some very risqué sex games, and recently they had had the idea of pouring plaster of Paris into his bottom using a funnel. This had hardened, unfortunately, and thus the constipation and pain. The GP referred him to our hospital, and it was my privilege to remove what turned out to be a pretty perfect cast of his rectal passage, along with – somewhat surprisingly – a squash ball.

  Nurse, Cambr
idge

  Miracle Cure

  A woman came into my A&E while I was on the front desk and the following conversation took place:

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘I’ve got appendicitis!’

  ‘What makes you say it is appendicitis?’

  ‘Because I had it before, when I was twelve! I had to go to hospital and have an operation!’

  ‘You had your appendix taken out?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘And you think you’ve got appendicitis?’

  ‘Oh...’

  Needless to say, it was a touch of the shits.

  Nurse, Bournemouth

  Chilli Con Vagi

  My colleague, a GP, recently told me about this patient he’d had. She came in to a drop-in appointment, refused to sit down in the waiting area, was sweating profusely and highly agitated, so the receptionist decided to bump her up the list a bit. When she came in she still wouldn’t sit down and blurted out, ‘I’ve got a chilli in my vagina!’

  ‘Umm, ok, is it stuck?’ my colleague asked.

  ‘No, I just want some advice please!’

  ‘Well, my advice would be that you take the chilli out of your vagina, and never put it back in again. Not only is it dangerous, they are far better used in a good curry.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  ‘Would you like to talk about why you’ve got a chilli in your vagina?’

  ‘No thanks, you’ve been a lot of help already,’ she said, and was out the door before the GP could say another word.

  Doctor, Norwich

  Speed Dogging

  A story was doing the rounds in my area recently about a teenager with ADHD who had been taking dexamphetamine with some friends (the drug was prescribed by his local community Adolescent Psychiatry service to stop him setting fire to his homework, among other things...). His parents had brought him in when they found him in their attic in a very, shall we say, incoherent state. Once he’d come off his high somewhat, the doctor wanted to ask him if he’s been doing anything that might put him at risk of contracting AIDS. The boy thought for a while and then said, ‘...screwing the dog?’

  Doctor, Truro

  Funny Games

  A man had inserted an acupuncture needle in his penis. We found this out only after having X-rayed, following complaints of a severe pain in his stomach. It had reached his bladder. When we showed him this X-ray, he admitted having put it there, ‘for fun’.

  Nurse, Leicester

  Buried Treasure

  I have personally removed the following items of flotsam and jetsam from various rectums over the past forty years:

  Several shapes of bottle

  Sex toys galore

  One aubergine

  A snapped broomstick handle

  The handle of an axe, with the axe head attached but not inserted

  The bauble from the end of a curtain rod (became unscrewed, apparently)

  A light bulb (unbroken, thankfully)

  One fluorescent tube

  A champagne glass (it had smashed)

  A full jar of instant coffee

  A prosthetic arm

  A plethora of toothbrushes

  Only one cucumber, oddly

  A marble pestle (luckily no mortar)

  A large rubber ‘Hulk’ fist (and again, two years later)

  Many eggs

  A can of Carnation condensed milk

  Limes

  A mobile phone, curiously not set to vibrate mode

  A stapler.

  Surgeon, Bristol

  Beardbugs

  I was once assisting a dentist as she was doing a filling. The patient was a bear of a man, with an imposing beard. Suddenly, as I was reaching for a packing pad, I noticed an ant running across the tray where we kept the tools. Not wanting to cause undue alarm, I decided to ignore it, and swapped the tools for sterile ones. Once the patient left I asked the dentist if he’d seen any ants, thinking we might have a pest problem, to which she replied, ‘It was the patient. His beard was seething with them, but I didn’t want to upset him by mentioning it. They kept trying to climb up my gloves.’

  Dental assistant, Newcastle

  Premium Call Rate

  This incident was related to me by a senior colleague who worked in the days when general practitioners still did lots of routine house calls and when doors were never locked. He knocked on the door of a female patient who called for him to walk straight in. He did so, to find her lying naked in a tin bath in front of the fire. She looked up and said cheerfully, ‘Oh it’s you, doctor! I thought it was the insurance man.’

  Doctor, Ayrshire

  Currant Affairs

  During our anatomy years, a group of us had to dissect the green body of an elderly female with a proud risus sardonicus (a death-mask grin).

  As the dissection progressed to the lower extremities, our tutor decided to demonstrate how a PV (a treatment applied to the vagina) would have to be done later in clinical training. As he withdrew his gloved middle finger, sitting happily on the tip of it was a raisin. He mused in wonderment, ‘How did that get there?’ A mutter response came from our worldly-wise colleague, having partied well the night before:

  ‘Maybe she had a bun in the oven!’

  Surgeon, Brighton

  Turd Time Lucky

  A young GP Registrar, who cut her teeth on squelchy carpet home visits in urban Ayrshire, later moved to a greater calling in deepest Drumchapel, Glasgow. Early one afternoon, summoned to minister to a sick child, she found herself walking up a nominal garden path, through the standard avenue of discarded couches, mattresses and old cookers to the battle-scarred door of a tenement, outside of which sat a big dog.

  Receiving the customary no answer to her knock, she called out ‘Doctor here!’ and as she slowly opened the door, the big dog immediately bounded upstairs ahead of her. She followed it cautiously into a dimly-lit living room, where half a dozen assorted, multi-pierced male and female slackers sat menacingly around the walls in a fug of wacky baccy, watching her intently.

  Uncomfortable and self-conscious – and from past experience unwilling to kneel on the floor – she crouched beside the settee to examine the florid chickenpox of her young patient. As she did so, she was conscious, out of the corner of her eye, of the big dog arching its back in the middle of the room and dumping a huge turd on the threadbare carpet.

  Nobody moved. Not a word was said. Appalled by this lumpen display of total indifference to filth, she hurriedly scribbled a script for Calpol and Calamine Lotion, handed it to the mother, and beat a hasty retreat towards fresh air and civilisation. Nobody moved.

  As she exited the room and closed the door in relief, behind her she heard someone cry:

  ‘Haw, Doctor! Yev forgotten yer fuckin dug!’

  Doctor, Glasgow

  Not Getting Through

  A 92-year-old woman had a full cardiac arrest at home and was rushed to the hospital. After about thirty minutes of unsuccessful resuscitation attempts, the old lady was pronounced dead. The doctor went to tell the lady’s 78-year-old daughter that her mother didn’t make it. ‘Didn’t make it? Where could they be? She left in the ambulance forty-five minutes ago!’

  Doctor, Sunderland

  Stuck in the Middle of You

  We were on call in our ambulance, when an ESA (Embarrassing Sexual Accident) came on the screen. The notes said that a couple had got stuck while in the midst of coital passion, with the man unable to remove his member. The notes went on to say that ‘The female is not in pain, but the male is feeling the pinch.’ This was enough to have us laughing uncontrollably; but what was more, the caller’s name had been recorded as ‘Male – friend on scene’. Sadly he had scarpered by the time we arrived.

  Ambulance driver, London

  Fire in the Hole

  ‘In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake, but I was only trying to retrieve the hamster,’ Philip told colleagues in the Severe Burns Unit he’d been rushed to
.

  Philip and his partner William had been admitted for emergency treatment after a felching session had gone seriously wrong. ‘I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum and slipped Gerald, our Campbell’s hamster, in,’ he said. ‘As usual, Will shouted, “Apocalypse!” – our safe word that he’d had enough. I tried to retrieve Gerald, but he wouldn’t come out again, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking the light might attract him.’

  The match must have ignited a pocket of intestinal gas and a flame shot out of the tube, igniting Philip’s hair and severely burning his face. It also set fire to Gerald’s fur and whiskers, which in turn ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestinal tract, propelling the hamster out like a cannonball.

  Philip suffered second-degree burns and a suspected broken nose from the impact of the hamster, while William suffered first and second-degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.

  I never heard what happened to Gerald the hamster.

  GP, Wolverhampton

  Taking the Plunge(R)

  The oddest thing that has happened in my career so far has to be the woman who Superglued a plunger to her vagina. Apparently she’d been having fun with her girlfriend when the harness for their strap-on broke. In the heat of the moment (she told us she ‘wasn’t thinking straight’), she thought that the plunger under the sink would give the right amount of, well, movement. After a quick wash under the hot tap (so considerate), she then tried to work out how to attach it. To cut a long story short, the pair decided in the heat of their ardour to use Superglue to affix the device. A foolish thing to do, and one that is very hard to hide whether you are sitting, lying or standing in the waiting room of A&E.

  Nurse, Manchester

  Foiled Again

  As a pharmacist, I am often a patient’s source of information about their medication. When one woman came to the pharmacy to get a refill on her suppositories, she asked me if I had any suggestions she could take to her doctor. She said that the suppositories were not working. ‘And not only don’t they work, they hurt! Sometimes they even make me bleed!’