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.

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.