In Rude Health Read online

  I sent him into A&E and, well, what they found was remarkable. Rather than an electric shock throwing him back, what the man had received was a bullet to the back of the head. It must have been a ricochet or fired from some distance, otherwise he’d have died for sure, but there it was, a bullet lodged in his skull. They do say that Nottingham has a lot of gun crime, but I’d yet to experience anything like that.

  GP, Nottingham

  Fence Corrective

  A man was admitted to our hospital soaking, with a sore penis and blotchy lumps all over his bald head.

  Apparently he’d been driving through the countryside and needed to stop and have a pee, choosing to go in a gap in the hedge. However, strung across the gap was what turned out to be electric fencing for keeping a bull in the field behind. He got a nasty shock all the way up his cock, fainted backwards into a ditch, and got covered in nettle stings.

  He admitted to me that he knew was probably okay but was worried the electric shock to his willy might have done lasting damage. My suspicion is that he thought the voltage might have turned him into some kind of superhero...

  A&E Nurse, Coleraine

  Ankling for Trouble

  A woman appeared at our A&E and complained that her ankle had been sore for about three months. When I tried to find out exactly what was wrong with it, she insisted that I look at the other one first - the healthy one. I insisted that I knew exactly what a normal ankle looks like, and that that knowledge should be more than adequate for this examination. At this she got furious, said that she wanted a new nurse, and that she wouldn’t show anyone the bad ankle until they’d seen what her normal ankle looked like. She was waiting a long time.

  Nurse, Sunderland

  Rip it Up and Start Again

  We were called to an attempted suicide in a student flat. A young couple had been drinking, had a fight, then made up, before falling into a deep sleep. The girlfriend had woken in the early hours, with the sensation that she was soaking wet. Turning on the bedside light and pulling back the covers, she was horrified to discover they were both drenched in blood, huge amounts of it.

  She quickly worked out she was okay and it seemed her boyfriend had been driven to try and kill himself as a result of the fight the previous evening. He was unconscious. She called 999 immediately.

  When we arrived she was hysterical. The bed was a mess. Like that scene in The Godfather. There was even blood on the walls. But something wasn’t right. We couldn’t find any incisions in his wrists or on his thighs. Although he was totally unconscious his pulse and breathing were normal.

  After further examination, it appeared the source of the blood was around his groin area. But again no cuts. My colleague then had a brainwave. He peeled back the lad’s foreskin and sure enough, his frenulum (the piece of skin that runs between the foreskin and the head of the penis – also known by Paramedics as the banjo string) was completely ripped. There was a lovely gaping wound right up to the urethra. Believe it or not, a remarkably common injury when couples have sex drunk – caused by lack of lubrication.

  You have been warned.

  Paramedic, Anglesey

  Root of the Problem

  A young lady came in to us complaining of passing blood; no pain, but the urine was red. I asked the usual questions; have you been doing anything different, strenuous or kinky – but no, she hadn’t done anything unusual. I checked her vitals but couldn’t find anything, so put her in a cubicle and asked for a urine sample. No blood showed up in the urine test, not even a drop – in fact, it looked like very healthy pee. We simply couldn’t work it out. I asked again if she was sure she’d done nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to excess?

  She thought for a moment and then the penny dropped. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve eating a load of beetroot this week.’

  GP, Chelmsford

  Pasta Joke

  This tale was told to me by a man waiting in A&E in the wee hours. He’d come home from the pub and was feeling a bit peckish. He rattled through his cupboards for a little something, but all he could find was a bag of pasta (penne, from the way he was describing it). He admitted that he wasn’t much of a cook, and mostly lived off microwave dinners since his wife had left. But when you’re hungry, you’re hungry, and in his state of inebriation decided to have a go at cooking – after all, how hard could it possibly be? So he got a pan, slapped in half a pack of butter, got it nice and hot, then chucked in the pasta and fried it up. It smelled good, but he was stirring it round and round for ages and it wasn’t getting any softer, so in the end he had to eat it raw. Apparently it really hurt his gums (he insisted on showing me).

  Once he’d finished his delicious supper, the beer really started to kick in, so he lay down on the sofa for a short doze. Next thing he knew, the room was full of smoke, there’s banging on the door, sirens out in the street. Now he was in A&E for the effects of smoke inhalation.

  A&E Registrar, Derby

  Read the Label

  A colleague of mine took a call from a patient who’d been prescribed antibiotics. The patient had a recurrent infection, and as such his GP felt he warranted a ten-day course to be sure of clearing the infection this time.

  The GP had asked him to take his antibiotics four times daily for ten days. Three days later he called NHS Direct, in obvious distress, to ask if he really needed the full course, as they were making him feel really weak. This was not a side effect anyone would expect, so my colleague asked him what made him think it was the medication doing this.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the doctor said the tablets are to be taken on an empty stomach so I have had nothing to eat for three days...’

  GP, NHS Direct

  Diminished Responsibility

  We’re taking a lovely young woman to hospital following an attempted suicide, when she says, ‘Do you know the great thing about hearing voices?’

  ‘You hear voices?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. I do. I hear voices...’ she wiggles her bandaged right hand in the air above her head. ‘And they tell me to do all kinds of mad things. Cut your arm, Sarah. Stab that dog, Sarah. Sarah, swear at those people. But...’ she leans forward, conspiratorially, ‘...the great thing is: I’m not responsible.’

  Community Psychiatric Nurse, Chester

  Thong Place at the Thong Time

  One of my colleagues told me about a man they were called out to on an early, rather chilly, November morning. He was called Tam, and was adamant that he was fine.

  He told them he’d had a wee tumble down an embankment and been halted by a no parking sign. He was covered in scratches and was wearing nothing but a thong, which immediately got alarm bells ringing.

  She asked him not to move whilst they checked him over, and while they were doing that she asked him what had happened. He said he was walking along the top of the embankment when two youths accosted him and demanded he take some Viagra, and when he’d politely declined they shoved him down the slope. The following exchange then took place:

  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

  Raw Honesty

  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?’

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

  Consultant, Newport

  Taxi-ing Situation

  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

  Bobby Dangler

  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

  Out on a Limb

  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

  Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands

  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

  Pants on Fire

  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

  Put a Sock in It

  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

  No Eye Dear

  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

  Ship of Fools

  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

  Bathing Beauty

  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

  Tick Tock, Up My Cock

  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

  Shedding Light on the Matter

  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

  Still Life

  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

  Blown it

  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.