Things we doctors find inside the human body

The human body contains many orifices. Certain ‘adventurous’ people do go off-tangent and occasionally they decide to insert various objects into their body parts. As I deal with the gut a lot, obviously we have to extract things stuck in the lower throat, oesophagus, rectum and the anus. Anything other than those areas, we have to wait and see..nature will expel a lot of objects as long as it can pass into a few constrictions in the gut.








We were chatting about the number of times we were called to remove things stuck and so far, a lot of notable patients came to mind. Over the past 2 years here, let me recall the few interesting incidents.

Patient number 1 came in with pain in his ass and previous history of schizophrenia. We brought him to the theatre and lo and behold, we found oranges, lemons and apples in his rectum. Now we know how he likes his fruits huh? Up his rear end!

Patient number 2 is a lady who came with bleeding from her urethra (urinary tract). We scanned and investigated her but could’t find anything wrong. After putting a scope up her urethra, guess what? We found the plastic cover of an eyeliner. Apparently, the patient ‘sat’ on her eyeliner cover and conveniently ‘forgot’ about it. All’s well that ends well as she left the hospital with no inanimate objects in her bladder!

The most recent event involved an elderly gentleman (in his seventies) who came with pain and bleeding from his anus. An X-ray showed a remarkably long and tubular object (around 25cm long) lodged in his rectum. I tried my best to stop laughing when we realized that it was a ‘toy’ stuffed up his rectum..yup, uncle went to Thailand and bought a dildo. Next thing he knows, he lose hold of the ‘slippery’ object while enjoying himself and the thing went in deeply into his rectum. When we asked why he inserted the dil— into his rectum, he said it helped him to pass motion.

As usual, Ms-aspiring surgeon was on-call and I tried to remove it in the OT but it was almost impossible as the did— slipped even deeper into the bowels the more we try to maneuver the long object out. It took us another day of waiting so that the bowel peristalsis pushed down the object and in the end, we managed to extract it with a lot effort, team-work and coordination.

In conclusion, a piece of friendly advice from the doctor : If you cannot resist inserting any foreign object into your body, do tie a strong string around it! The gesture is much appreciated :-P