Am I the Only One That Worries?

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only doctor that worries...  I fear I might do the wrong thing for a patient, and I worry that I could do things better.

I worry because I care.  I really want to do the right thing and sometimes wonder if I'm really up to it.  

I've seen and known doctors that never worry.  They never think they do the wrong thing.  When I was in med school and residency, I used to admire these doctors.  I used to revere their confidence, and longed for the day that I, too, could be so sure of myself and every decision I made treating my patients.

Well, that day, for me, has never come.  I have come to realize, however, that these doctors that are so sure of themselves are usually not very good doctors.  I think many of them have learned to hide their incompetence behind a veil of arrogance.

I asked one of my attendings that I truly respected once just before I finished residency if that feeling would ever go away...  He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eye and said, "If that feeling ever goes away, that's when you really need to start worrying."

What were you taking this medicine for?

Yuck!  One other complication of being fat is that things tend to get lost in fat rolls...

I had this lady once who was so large she couldn't walk.  When you're that large, and can't get up, you certainly can't wipe your ass and clean yourself... 

While examining her, I noticed that she had a pretty severe fungal skin infection within her fat rolls, or "pannus" as we like to call it.  When I lifted up one roll, I found a prescription bottle stuck within the roll...  After peeling it out, I looked at the label and realized she hadn't told me that she was taking this medicine...  Well, actually, she hadn't taken it in about 2 months.  At least that's how long ago the prescription was filled, and it was almost full.

She didn't know what that prescription was for, or why it was prescribed to her.  Apparently she hadn't been taking it.  

What a surprise.

Things people have put in their ass that they probably shouldn't have...

Welcome to 2008... I haven't posted in a while... Not for lack of stories to tell, but lack of time in general for me to sit down and type...

I understand that people need to do things to spice up their sex lives, but I'm still amazed at things people stick up their butts. Most of the time, these items are so large that patient's have to go to the operating room to have them removed. While plain old vibrators are the most common "foreign body" I've seen, it's always interesting when they're the battery operated kind and are still on... You can hear the hum when you walk in the room, and the vibration travels nicely through the soft tissues of the abdomen to the abdominal wall. I also love the x-rays that show a perfectly focused abdominal x-ray with the blurry phallus in the middle...


I also had a guy come in with a cordless phone inserted antenna down... Yes, an actual cordless phone with the thick plastic kind of antenna that's attached (not the telescoping metal kind)...


Then there was the "ship in a bottle!" That one was unique. It was a small ship-in-a-bottle, but a ship-in-a-bottle none the less! It was made of blown glass, and the ship inside was blown glass, too. You could actually make it out on the x-ray which was pretty funny.


One other that stands out as unique, was "3-potatoes-in-a-condom." They weren't Idaho bakers, or anything like that... they were more like New Potatoes (you know, the smaller kind)... But, they were potatoes. And, there were 3 of them. They were all inside a condom, tied at the end into a knot so none of them would fall out.


These cases are hard... they are very funny in a sick sort of ER humor kind of way. The key is to laugh after the patient has left the emergency room...

I've come up with some VERY simple rules that everyone should follow in case they get an urge to shove something up their ass in the heat of the moment...

1. DON'T use anything thicker than the largest crap you've ever produced in your life.
2. DON'T use anything with sharp or jagged edges.
3. DON'T use anything that has the potential to break or shatter into little bits that are sharp or have jagged edges.
4. DO use something that has a base that is quite larger than the diameter of whatever it is you're shoving up your ass.
5. DO use LOTS of lube.