ER Stories:  The One You DON’T Want to Hear

So, a late forties dude comes to the ER.  A dude in his late forties, not some skinny guy in a zoot suit with a Tommy gun.  I look on the board and it says, “Rectal bleeding”, those are always a try-to-avoided case, but when you are going down the line, sometimes you have to bite the bullet. 

I take him back to a room and ask the usual, “So, what brings you to the hospital tonight?” (At three in the morning no less.) He begins to regale me with a tale of an out of control hemorrhoid, and how this evil hemorrhoid is causing him great discomfort and making pooping a chore.  I was about to slap him around and explain Preparation H to this guy when the story took an even weirder turn.  “It was bothering me so much...I finally put a rubber band around it.”

My mind started going into overdrive trying to put those words together in a sentence that seemed reasonable.  I began trying to picture the logistics of putting a rubber band around a hemorrhoid, and then I started picturing this guy doubled over trying to look at his own rectum, then going through that weird, rubber-band technique of twisting it around a few times to get it tighter.  I think he realized my silent contemplation extending into the uncomfortable, because he suddenly blurted, “I read about hemorrhoid ligation on Web-MD.” Ohhhhhhh!  Good ol’ Web-MD.  Nothing ever goes wrong with the random information found on the internet. 

On a side rant, we get a lot of people who have massive issues following some home remedy, or self diagnosis, found on Web-MD.  I want to start a website called Web-Bank.  People will mail/wire/paypal me money and I will keep it for them, at an impressive rate of return, and when they are ready, I will send it back.  You can rest assured it is 100% reliable, because it says Bank in the title.

Back to our patient at hand, The gentleman was stating how great it was working.  Almost instant resolve of all symptoms, no itching or burning, a return to normal, satisfying poops, it was as if the heavens had parted and shined a ray of hope on to his beleaguered rectum.  Then a few days into this unorthodox home remedy, he realized, the rubber band fell off.  He said he was suddenly besieged by a flooding of blood back into the hemorrhoid, and although non-painful, it was double in size and he was afraid it would continue to grow and eventually explode, “possibly causing him to bleed to death.” Now that would be a death worthy of the Darwin Awards.

SPOILER ALERT
as in spoiling your dinner, not the story
So, I go tell the doctor on duty, and after an exceedingly inappropriate number of, “What!?!  How?!?” He finally agreed to come and see for himself.  I was relegated to holding the flashlight during this part of the exam. 
It looked like he was growing a large purple grape next to his asshole.
He was told: 

A.  Not to do that again
B.  Ligation of hemorrhoids is for internal, not external hemorrhoids, and NOT something done at home.
C.  Go sit in a hot bath this weekend as long as you can and go see your primary doctor on Monday

Proudly, he was in and out in about fifteen minutes.  Another life saved in the ER.  And, as oddly convenient as it is to this story, someone did really come up to me shortly afterward and offer me some grapes.  Luckily they were green, if they had been purple I might have puked.

•   Comments(10)    Posted by killer on 04/06 at 05:02 PM
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