DEATH’S BACK DOOR

A patient has had the better of me. On three separate occasions I have inserted my gloved hand up his anal passage in a way that I believed would cause him excruciating pain, but no, the kinky masochist loved every second. I was merely a pawn in realizing his sexual fantasies, which is certainly not in my job description. 

 He came into A&E with that bow-legged wobble that is normally caused by a blood-vessel bursting screw and declined to sit down in the waiting room. His story was that he had tried to fashion his own version of anal beads using nuts and bolts stuffed into a condom. Unfortunately for him and his anus, the condom burst leaving the bits and bobs lost in his bum. I inserted my hand past his not-so-tight sphincter, right up to the wrist until I could extract a bolt, trying to stop the blunt edges causing too much pain. It was only after he came back two more times with the same problem that it occurred to me: The grimace of pained pleasure on his face revealed that the anal beads were only half the fun. The other half was having my hand wriggling around in his butt. I felt violated.

As we have seen with the vagina and penis, people will insert any available object into any available hole. The anus is by far the favourite. We receive at least five patients a week with non-kosher shit up their arses and it’s getting pretty tedious. The only real pleasure in treating patients with foreign objects in their buttholes is listening to their excuses. One man claimed he kept his cucumbers in the shower. He said that he had slipped and landed on one and the gourd had been irretrievably lost in his anal passage.

Rectal vegetables are not unusual. The only limitation of the range of objects found in the anus is the capacity of the rectum to accommodate them. People are incredibly imaginative when it comes to autoerotic anal stimulation. Who looks at a hard-boiled egg at the breakfast table and decides that ramming it up an asshole is far more appetizing than eating it?

Animals are no exception. A 50-year-old man inserted a live eel in his rectum to “relieve constipation.” Unfortunately the eel ate its way through the bowel and caused an anal perforation that necessitated surgery and a two-month relationship with a colostomy bag. Why put it in headfirst? Gerbils are quite popular too because of their apparently pleasant scratching sensation. One case involved a man who came in with side pain. The X-ray showed that a gerbil had gnawed on and eventually suffocated in his gut.

Other objects recovered include bedposts, doorknobs, mayonnaise jars, candles, a small pistol, a grocery-and-newspaper combo, a 12-inch long and 8-inch wide salami, tennis balls, an aluminum tube (used by a prisoner to store money and other valuables), axe handles, soldering irons, a frozen pig tail, a spatula, and an ice pick. Another case involved removing a vibrator from a 65-year-old man who had it stuffed in his rectum for 6 months, traveling around the world with it. There was also the 20-year-old who went to A&E with a half-full bottle of V8 in his descending colon. He had gone after it with a wire hanger attempting to get it out, shredding his colon in the process. The sad thing was he still lived with his parents and they came in to be with him during the surgery to remove it. He ended up shitting into a bag for the rest of his life.

At this point you might be asking yourself, “I get my kicks from filling my butt with household goods. What can I expect if something gets stuck up there and I end up at the hospital?” First, the doctor will ask you how it happened. You can say you fell on an orange while standing on your kitchen counter to change a light bulb, but they won’t believe you, so you may as well be honest. You will have a digital rectal exam and perhaps an X-ray to determine the nature and position of the foreign body. Then normally we’ll just bend you over and dive in to pull it out, but we’ll put you under beforehand if we can’t get a good grip and you’re screaming in agony while you’re conscious. It’s a bit of a squeeze, but you can get your whole hand into the rectum to retrieve an object from an anesthetized patient.

Your risk factors include becoming an incessant farter with poor bowel control that will result in a frequent and urgent need for immediate defecation. But the biggest risk is perforating your bowel, which is rare but can be deadly. One man was found to have the entire contents of his toolbox in his bowel after his autopsy.

So if you just can’t kick the habit of masturbating your bumhole with vegetables, then please just keep a good grip like this guy, so I don’t end up having to fish it out.

DR MONA MOORE