Dragonfly I have not seen any other posts, but thank you for pointing that out.
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SubscribeDr Rosemary Leonard, GP and BBC Breakfast's resident doctor, recalls the weird and...well, mainly just weird encounters of a medical professional over the years. From Buzz Lightyear to Creme Eggs - there's a place for both, and that's not where they ended up in these instances.
We had a big family supper last night, and as both my younger son and my niece are clinical medical students, the conversation, as usual, turned to matters of health and wellbeing. Only this time, rather than discussing the merits or otherwise of new treatments, we ended up in the realm of the extraordinary, and how real life often is stranger than fact.
It was my niece who started it. She recalled how she had recently seen a bizarre case involving the toy Buzz Lightyear. Apparently a man had placed - for reasons best known to himself - one of these inside his back passage. The battery was still operating, so the toy's arms flailed outwards, which meant it was impossible to remove. During the major operation that followed (which involved cutting open his abdomen and his bowel) quite understandably the medical staff found it difficult to keep a straight face as a voice kept being heard, not from the patient's mouth, but from the other end of his body.
It reminded me of a similar case involving a creme egg, which had been placed by an amorous boyfriend in his girlfriend’s vagina. They rang me in the surgery in some distress when the chocolate, rather inevitably inside a body with a temperature of 37 degrees, began to melt, and they were unable to retrieve it. I think they expected me to undertake a rather unusual Easter egg hunt, and they weren’t too impressed when I suggested the solution was merely to take a long, hot bath.
The medical staff found it difficult to keep a straight face as a voice kept being heard, not from the patient's mouth, but from the other end of his body.
There have also been many times when I have felt I have been working more like a detective than a doctor.
Every GP sees patients with sexually transmitted diseases on a fairly regular basis, but having three young women come into my surgery within a matter of weeks, all pregnant, and all with gonorrhoea, was highly unusual, especially as the father of the child in each case had recently proposed. As is usual, the source of the infection had to be traced, and when eventually a single culprit was found, it was extremely tempting to ask him if he knew that polygamy was against the law.
Then there are the patients who never let on that they are taking other medicines from abroad. Though it's understandable to foreigners to think that medicines from their home are trustworthy, medical practices in far flung lands, especially the Far East, can be very different to those in the UK. I have had more than one case where abnormal blood test results have been found to be due to a foreign "remedy" and also had instances where the puzzling failure of my prescribed medicine to have any effect was due to the patient simultaneously using a foreign medicine with an opposite action.
If any of these story lines appeared in a soap opera, I suspect there would be cries of disbelief, but after 25 years as a GP, I now expect the unexpected. It is one of the many joys of my job.
Rosemary's book, Doctor's Notes.
By Dr Rosemary Leonard
Twitter: @DrRosemaryL
Dragonfly I have not seen any other posts, but thank you for pointing that out.
You just do a search, Elegran, using the search box at the top of the page.
I was relying on my memory (I hate using that terrible search engine).
On a search I have found that Jaxie posted four times in 2011, and once on the thread testing Boots Number 7 facecare. Buffersmoll posted a total of five scattered times in 2013. So neither is a completely new member, they really come into the first category I mentioned - people who read the forums but (hardly ever) post anything.
My days of relying on my memory for anything seem to be long gone! Last week I bought a t shirt that I'd already bought, washed and put to be ironed....and forgotten about!
I have no medical antecedents, but I see no problem in telling the stories providing the patient is not identifiable.
Does anyone remember the 'Doctor in the House' series of books? I read the first one about the eponymous doctor's student days and thought it hilarious - then went to university myself and realised it was accurate.
I was at a university with a medical school and knew a medical student who was generally referred to as 'fingers' among female students who knew him. We exchanged stories about how soon after meeting him he tried to get his hands all over you. Once I casually asked him what he intended to do when he graduated, thinking he might be a GP like his father. His answer was 'gynaecologist'. I vowed then and there that if ever I needed to see a gynaecologist, my first recourse would be to a medical directory to find out where he was working, just in case he was at my local hospital.
Well there had to be some men going into gynaecology for that very reason didn't there, whether conscious or unconscious. I always thought it would be nice if it could be an all female profession. How politically incorrect is that
Jess . in theory not a bad idea , but cannot really see it happening !!
I don't think I'm po-faced or a killjoy but I don't find these anecdotes funny - I think they're bizarre and rather sad. Would you laugh about a person who has an irrational hatred of, for instance, one of their legs and pleads with a doctor to amputate it?
The people that this doctor found so amusing may well have some sort of mental health issue/distorted sexual drive that leads them to behave in a way that is potentially dangerous.
I would never laugh at a named individual with a mental and physical problem but I can laugh at an anonymised story about someone's bizarre behaviour, whether medical or anything else.
I do feel we are reaching a point where we are not allowed to laugh at anything because just possibly someone somewhere might ever so slightly not like the joke. DH has at various times picked up books making fun someway or another at his profession, his nationality and his hobbies. These books are full of stories of unfortunate things that have happened to other people in a context he is familiar with, some of which he can identify with. No individual is identified so no one personally affected. Some of the stories I suspect are apocryphal anyway.
Didn't Elizabeth Bennet in 'Pride and Prejudice say 'I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me..'
"distorted sexual drive". Really eleothan? Is that what you think it is?
Good one FlicketyB. And I like Shakespeare's "wise enough to play the fool".
I think we all look for humour to make our working lives pleasanter and in some cases, tolerable. And there must be some reason for the popularity of books written by members of different occupations about their working lives! How about Call the Midwife?
Gives another meaning to the phrase - "To Infinity and Beyond".
Which is where the person involved was obviously aiming.
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