You Did What with a Hot-dog???

Need I say more?

After a week of more serious posts, we’re overdue for a laugh, especially as we hit the weekend. And what better to discuss than the age-old tongue-in-cheek subject of vaginal foreign bodies …

That was all that it said on the ER board when I signed up for this patient not too long ago. She was a respectable 57 years old, so my expectations were not too exotic. How naive of me.

Mrs. S had a slight problem. Turns out that she and her husband were looking to “spice up” their love life a little, and so they thought “wouldn’t it be kinky if he sexually stimulated her with a hot-dog?”. Problem is that they believe a piece broke off the tip of the ill-fated hot-dog in question, and their attempts to find it were not successful. Hence the embarrassing ER visit. (The husband didn’t have the gall to come in with her and hid out in the parking lot)

Stifling all attempts at bursting out in laughter or asking her WTF, I hurried out of the room after telling her that I needed the nurse so we could go fishing – I mean searching – for the missing hot-dog tip. I momentarily considered asking what kind of hot-dog, but figured that might be in bad taste, no pun intended.

So after trying to remember something really serious and depressing to suppress my laughter, I returned with my nurse (after telling her she had better not make any funny gestures). When I looked inside, the first thing that surprised me was the excoriated appearance of her cervix. Thinking with my medical brain first, I asked her if she had recently had a pap smear since cancer can sometimes appear in a similar fashion. She said that she indeed had, and that it had been normal for decades now.

Having confirmed that, I then switched to my ER brain and asked her to tell me more about this hot-dog and the force that was used. She turned beet-red and said that it was “pretty vigorous”. The nurse wanted to know if it was a Kielbasa which at the moment seemed to be a reasonable question. I then asked her if she had actually seen a broken part of it, or if it just seemed shorter? She said it just looked shorter, and that they hadn’t examined it further and just assumed a piece was inside her due to the extreme discomfort in her vaginal area.

So I did another thorough check of her entire vaginal area and still came up empty. As embarrassing as it was going to be, I had to tell her that it looks like the poor hot-dog tip was literally pounded and thus seemed shorter.  All the redness over the cervix though and the subsequent swelling was creating a foreign-body sensation as opposed to left-over hot-dog.

We all then had a good laugh when she said she wouldn’t be doing that again, and this gave both me and my nurse a good opening to let out all that pent up laughter in an appropriate way. We patted her on the back and told her that  people had done stranger things (ok, that was a total lie, but with good intentions) and she felt a little better. She walked, bowlegged, out of the ER to the waiting car that promptly sped away. I only wish I could have heard the conversation that followed