By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg
No matter how careful we think we are, we’re all prone to doing some pretty stupid things to our bodies. Some of us take responsibility for our own actions. Others blame their defective thongs.
Remember Macrida Patterson? She’s the Los Angeles traffic cop who sued Victoria’s Secret for an eye injury that occurred when a heart-shaped metal fastener in her underwear snapped, popped into her eye and injured her cornea.
The case of the hazardous thong got us talking about the fact that people typically look for some excuse or someone else to blame when they get hurt. Nowhere is this more evident than in the emergency room.
Just this past week, Billy was working in the ER and he saw a classic example of a poor decision gone haywire. It was a busy Monday evening and the ER was filled with your usual assortment of injured, infirmed and intoxicated. Alcohol is usually involved in most of the ER’s most brilliantly dumb accidents. In fact, from 1992 through 2000, researchers found that there were an estimated 68.6 million emergency department visits related to alcohol, almost 8 percent of the total ER visits during that time period.
We have to assume that some intoxicant was involved in this particular case, but by the time Billy got involved, it was too late for questions. A middle-aged man had apparently needed to urinate and used a nearby plastic bottle. After inserting his penis in the hole, he found himself unable to extricate his now swollen member from the grasp of this plastic vise. It is unclear what attempts he made on his own, but by the time he arrived he was trapped and had been unable to relieve himself. After a hefty dose of morphine, two young residents and a junior attending physician unsuccessfully tried to free him from captivity. By the time Billy arrived, he was screaming in pain.
Doctors refer to objects that are swallowed or inserted as “foreign bodies.” There are countless stories of various things removed from patients’ stomachs, noses, ears, rectums and vaginas. The bottle doesn’t quite qualify as a foreign body (as it’s the entrapper not the entrapped), but a search of medical literature revealed similar cases of “penile entrapment in a plastic bottle.” In these situations, the danger is that prolonged strangulation of the penis can lead to gangrene and even result in the amputation of the affected part.
Watching reruns of MacGyver would probably be more useful than medical school in a case like this. A ring cutter that ER doctors use to cut through metal was slowly making its way through the hard plastic, but the patient kept struggling and howling.
After a heavy dose of sedation, a carefully placed metal blade between the bottle and the penis provided the leverage needed to cut through the plastic. As the bottle was being removed, the patient was finally able to urinate and, unfortunately, sprayed all over poor Dr. Billy.
In the ER, no good deed goes unpunished.
As the patient was sleeping off the sedation, the ER staff went back to their routine business. We never found out the precise details of how this occurred, but keep your eyes on the local papers. You may come across a story about a certain gentleman suing a bottle manufacturer.
