Medical Dilemmas And Conundrums

Desperate times lead to desperate measures ... or so they say. 

Kurt Kaser, Back At His Farm.

Kurt Kaser, a 63 year old Nebraskan farmer was proof of this back in 2019. On the 19th April of that year he was operating a grain hopper while uploading corn.

Unfortunately he stepped on the hopper lid opening, and his left foot was sucked in by the powerful suction. He was all alone and didn't have his mobile phone on him or within reach. Now I don't know what you would have done next, but personally I might have waited for while to see if anyone came looking for me, but perhaps Mr Kaser knew that this was very unlikely, but in any case he decided that this was a desperate moment and called for a desperate measure.
 
So searching his pockets he found his pocket knife with its 3 inch (7.6cm) blade, and started sawing at his left leg just below the knee. He cut the whole leg off and then crawled 150 feet to his phone and called for medical assistance ... he remained conscious throughout this ordeal and during the helicopter flight to the nearest hospital.
 
He recovered, although minus a leg .... and once fitted with a false leg resumed work on his farm .... they breed them tough in Nebraska.

You Have To Nose These Things

According to the Royal College of Surgeons, the NHS in the UK apparently spends £3 ($4) million a year removing removing foreign objects that have been inserted and got trapped up children's ears and noses (I am not going to think about the other orifices that children and a number of adults find interesting enough to insert objects in to .... but see further down this post). 

Kids Like Inserting Objects Into Their Noses

Between 2010 and 2016, 26,000 objects removed by hospitals - 95 percent from noses and 85 percent involved children. The most common objects removed from children's orifices are jewellery, paper and plastic toys, while the ubiquitous cotton buds were the most common from adults ears.

Bust A Heart Valve

Douglas Trendle, better known to the world as Buster Bloodvessel and front man for the Ska group Bad Manners, took a tumble on the stage in 2016, while performing a gig at the Great Dorset Steam Festival, near Tarrant Hinton in Dorset. He not only broke four ribs, but also very nearly bust a blood vessel in his heart and was taken to hospital. He was allowed to go home after a short stay and tests. This is not his first brush with death on stage, in 2001 he was taken to hospital in the northern Italian city of Perugia, where doctors diagnosed a strangulated hernia.

Pearls Of East
 
Without doubt, the quote of the week has to be the words spoken by a 79 year old Chinese man called Mr Chen. He had been admitted to hospital with a large ceramic spoon stuck up his back passage. When asked how this had happened, he said that he had been suffering severe constipation and had inserted the spoon up his bottom in an effort to work it out (should have used a pencil ... old joke "Did you hear about the constipated mathematician? ... He worked it out with his pencil!")
 
But instead of the relief he had expected, it had simply become stuck as well. But it was then that he uttered the immortal words of wisdom "If you climb enough mountains, you'll eventually meet a tiger"  ....... I think we can all nod our heads in agreement with that.
 
Stranger Things Have Happened .... Really!  

In August 2019 it was reported that a woman had turned up at the main hospital in Bangkok Thailand complaining of vaginal pain .... when questioned, she stated that she had a cucumber stuck inside it. The 51 year old told the staff that she had fallen down in her house, and landed on the cucumber and it simply "slipped inside her". How it managed this feat lying sideways (or how it was stood on end if that was the case), or even why she was naked, she was unable to clarify, but she insisted it was "just an accident".