In Rude Health (5 page)

As he did a wee he threw his cigarette end into the loo. The explosion brought his wife running upstairs, where she found him crumpled against the wall, having been blown backwards through the
door, his hair, beard, eyebrows and pubes burnt off and his clothes smouldering. She dialled 999 and we came and took care of him. Hopefully he’ll remember to clean up his own mess in the
future...

Paramedic, Northampton

A rather large woman was brought in by ambulance with two broken legs. She’d been trampolining and had gone too high, come back down to earth and gone straight through
the trampoline. Ouch.

A relative who was with her said, ‘I was gardening, so I didn’t see it happen, but I felt the ground shake and just instinctively knew what had happened.’

Orthopaedic Surgeon, Cardiff

We looked after a drunken eejit who decided to take a walk on a frozen canal one Christmas Eve without noticing the ice was actually just moonlight. He jumped down from the
walkway, and immediately sank up to his waist in water, with his legs caught in three feet of ice-cold mud. It was three hours till he was
found,
by which time he had a
lovely dose of hypothermia and had to celebrate Christmas in the observation ward.

Nurse, Dublin

I treated a gentleman in late middle age who had found he was having trouble peeing straight, so he decided to make some modifications to his penis. He inserted a small
ball-bearing into the tip of the urethra reasoning that if it worked for a ballpoint pen, then it should improve his aim. Apparently as well as hurting like mad, and giving him a nasty urinary
tract infection, it also made him into more of a sprinkler than a Deadeye Dan.

Urology Registrar, Salisbury

A wee old man had come to see me for a check-up, and mentioned that he’d quite like to stop smoking. Naturally I jumped on this and immediately talked to him about things
that could help him achieve this. He liked the sound of patches, so I gave him a prescription for them, and then didn’t see him for a few weeks. When he did eventually return, he came in
slightly agitated, and explained to me that he’d been feeling very sick. I asked him to take off his top, so I could hear his chest. His whole torso was covered in patches. Apparently he
hadn’t read that when you put a new patch on every day, you take the old one off.

GP, Stornoway

A couple of teenagers, who had been in to see a relative, ‘borrowed’ one of the wheelchairs from the lobby of the hospital, and took it outside to have a go around
the car park. Then one of them decided he’d take on the stairs, Italian Job-style. After that, he wasn’t just visiting anymore.

Nurse, Dundee

Doing the pain assessment for a woman who we were pretty sure was going into labour, the following exchange took place:

Me: Is your pain intermittent or constant?

Patient: What?

Me: Does your pain come and go or is it constant?

Patient: Well, it constantly comes and goes!

Community Midwife, Poole

James was 87, the sweetest of patients, one of nature’s gentlemen. One day when I was giving James a sponge bath I’d stood him up so I could wash his privates when
he looked down and said, ‘Have you ever seen anything so big?’

I was utterly speechless – couldn’t think of anything to say.

James shook his head and said, ‘My brother-in-law told me once that these have got to be the biggest bloody feet he’d ever seen!’

Geriatric Nurse, Ashford

I’ll never forget the poor woman who, when applying a homemade enema, suspected – and then, as warmth grew, suddenly realised – that, in a dimly lit room,
she’d grabbed a bottle of chilli oil by mistake. There was very little we could do for her, except for filling her with milk while she lay on her front, sweating like mad and mooing with
pain.

A&E Consultant, Winchester

A man was fixing his car, fiddling about under the bonnet, when he suddenly received an almighty electric shock, throwing him to the ground and giving him a nasty blow to the
back of the head. He got his wife to have a look, but she couldn’t see anything except a nasty graze, and so just slapped a dressing on to it. The next day, however, he started to feel really
dizzy, nauseous and forgetful, so they went to the doctor’s (that’s me) to get it looked at. At first inspection I couldn’t see anything more than his wife could, but the
dizziness was a bit alarming, so I thought we’d better scan his brain to make sure there was no evolving bleed or anything like that.

I sent him into A&E and, well, what they found was remarkable. Rather than an electric shock throwing him back, what the man had received was a bullet to the back of the head. It must have
been a ricochet or fired from some distance, otherwise he’d have died for sure, but there it was, a bullet lodged in his skull. They do say that Nottingham has a lot of gun crime, but
I’d yet to experience anything like that.

GP, Nottingham

A man was admitted to our hospital soaking, with a sore penis and blotchy lumps all over his bald head.

Apparently he’d been driving through the countryside and needed to stop and have a pee, choosing to go in a gap in the hedge. However, strung across the gap was what turned out to be
electric fencing for keeping a bull in the field
behind.
He got a nasty shock all the way up his cock, fainted backwards into a ditch, and got covered in nettle
stings.

He admitted to me that he knew was probably okay but was worried the electric shock to his willy might have done lasting damage. My suspicion is that he thought the voltage might have turned him
into some kind of superhero...

A&E Nurse, Coleraine

A woman appeared at our A&E and complained that her ankle had been sore for about three months. When I tried to find out exactly what was wrong with it, she insisted that I
look at the other one first - the healthy one. I insisted that I knew exactly what a normal ankle looks like, and that that knowledge should be more than adequate for this examination. At this she
got furious, said that she wanted a new nurse, and that she wouldn’t show anyone the bad ankle until they’d seen what her normal ankle looked like. She was waiting a long time.

Nurse, Sunderland

We were called to an attempted suicide in a student flat. A young couple had been drinking, had a fight, then made up, before falling into a deep sleep. The girlfriend had
woken in the early hours, with the sensation that she was soaking wet. Turning on the bedside light and pulling back the covers, she was horrified to discover they were both drenched in blood, huge
amounts of it.

She quickly worked out she was okay and it seemed her boyfriend had been driven to try and kill himself as a result of the fight the previous evening. He was unconscious. She called 999
immediately.

When we arrived she was hysterical. The bed was a mess. Like that scene in
The Godfather.
There was even blood on the walls. But something wasn’t right. We couldn’t find any
incisions in his wrists or on his thighs. Although he was totally unconscious his pulse and breathing were normal.

After further examination, it appeared the source of the blood was around his groin area. But again no cuts. My colleague then had a brainwave. He peeled back the lad’s foreskin and sure
enough, his frenulum (the piece of skin that runs between the foreskin and the head of the penis – also known by Paramedics as the banjo string) was completely ripped. There was a lovely
gaping wound right up to the urethra. Believe it or not, a remarkably common injury when couples have sex drunk – caused by lack of lubrication.

You have been warned.

Paramedic, Anglesey

A young lady came in to us complaining of passing blood; no pain, but the urine was red. I asked the usual questions; have you been doing anything different, strenuous or kinky
– but no, she hadn’t done anything unusual. I checked her vitals but couldn’t find anything, so put her in a cubicle and asked for a urine sample. No blood showed up in the urine
test, not even a drop – in fact, it looked like very healthy pee. We simply couldn’t work it out. I asked again if she was sure she’d done nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to
excess?

She thought for a moment and then the penny dropped. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve eating a load of beetroot this week.’

GP, Chelmsford

This tale was told to me by a man waiting in A&E in the wee hours. He’d come home from the pub and was feeling a bit peckish. He rattled through his cupboards for a
little something, but all he could find was a bag of pasta (penne, from the way he was describing it). He admitted that he wasn’t much of a cook, and mostly lived off microwave dinners since
his wife had left. But when you’re hungry, you’re hungry, and in his state of inebriation decided to have a go at cooking – after all, how hard could it possibly be? So he got a
pan, slapped in half a pack of butter, got it nice and hot, then chucked in the pasta and fried it up. It smelled good, but he was stirring it round and round for ages and it wasn’t getting
any softer, so in the end he had to eat it raw. Apparently it really hurt his gums (he insisted on showing me).

Once he’d finished his delicious supper, the beer really started to kick in, so he lay down on the sofa for a short doze. Next thing he knew, the room was full of smoke, there’s banging on the door, sirens out in the street. Now he was in A&E for the effects of smoke inhalation.

A&E Registrar, Derby

A colleague of mine took a call from a patient who’d been prescribed antibiotics. The patient had a recurrent infection, and as such his GP felt he warranted a ten-day
course to be sure of clearing the infection this time.

The GP had asked him to take his antibiotics four times daily for ten days. Three days later he called NHS Direct, in obvious distress, to ask if he really needed the full course, as they were
making him feel really weak. This was not a side effect anyone would expect, so my colleague asked him what made him think it was the medication doing this.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the doctor said the tablets are to be taken on an empty stomach so I have had nothing to eat for three days...’

GP, NHS Direct

We’re taking a lovely young woman to hospital following an attempted suicide, when she says, ‘Do you know the great thing about hearing voices?’

‘You hear voices?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I do. I hear voices...’ she wiggles her bandaged right hand in the air above her head. ‘And they tell me to do all kinds of mad things. Cut your arm, Sarah. Stab that
dog, Sarah. Sarah, swear at those people. But...’ she leans forward, conspiratorially, ‘...the great thing is:
I’m
not responsible
.’

Community Psychiatric Nurse, Chester

One of my colleagues told me about a man they were called out to on an early, rather chilly, November morning. He was called Tam, and was adamant that he was fine.

He told them he’d had a wee tumble down an embankment and been halted by a no parking sign. He was covered in scratches and was wearing nothing but a thong, which immediately got alarm
bells ringing.

She asked him not to move whilst they checked him over, and while they were doing that she asked him what had happened. He said he was walking along the top of the embankment when two youths
accosted him and demanded he take some Viagra, and when he’d politely declined they shoved him down the slope. The following exchange then took place: