I don't know what it is about the human race but, ever since the dawn of time, we seem to have been on a never-ending mission to find the biggest object possible to shove up our butts. From naturally-phallic shaped objects to carefully-honed creations designed to stimulate those special spots, people will try just about anything to achieve maximum stimulation.
Unfortunately, it goes wrong quite often.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that there's not a doctor or a paramedic or an emergency room worker out there who doesn't have at least one story of a person who "accidentally fell" on a cucumber, or "somehow" got a mobile phone lodged in their rectum - because, apparently, not many people think twice before sitting on something that could potentially destroy their insides.
Just in the last week, in fact, a report released in the British Medical Journal detailed an incident in Italy in which a team of doctors had to invent a brand new tool in order to remove a 23-inch dildo from a 31-year-old man.
When the unnamed (and apparently very adventurous) man showed up at the emergency room, he did not give explicit details about the object lodged inside his body. All he would say was that it was causing him some slight abdominal pain, and that it could not be removed by hand. At that point, it had been in his colon for 24 hours.
Obviously fairly used to seeing similar cases, staff at the hospital calmly referred the man for an X-Ray... which very quickly showed the true - and horrific - extent of the situation.
The man was immediately referred to Dr. Lorenzo Dioscoridi, an endoscopist, who, along with his colleagues, tried several methods in order to remove the dildo. The usual approach is to snare it with a wire loop (something that is most commonly used to remove polyps) or displace it with a balloon, but these techniques proved insufficient due to "the rigidity, the smoothness and the size of the object."
Eventually, Dr. Dioscoridi and his team concluded that their existing tools were not up to the job, and so they created a new one.
The tool was built from some medical wire pushed through a stent tube to make the shape of a lasso. Unlike the sorts of loops used to tackle polyps, the so-called "guidewire lasso" was designed to be rigid enough to get a grip on the dildo and retrieve it from the colon.
And it worked!
"We finally succeeded in the endoscopic extraction of the device, catching the distal edge of the dildo with this guidewire lasso," wrote Dr. Dioscoridi and his colleagues in the medical report. "We suggest this new technique as a valid option to remove large foreign bodies from the colon and rectum when standard endoscopic methods for foreign body extraction fail."
The afflicted man was apparently very grateful for the doctor's innovative techniques, and wrote him a note thanking him for helping with his "embarrassing" problem.
And hopefully his experience will be a lesson to us all: don't go shoving stuff in your butt (or, indeed, any other part of your body) if it's going to land you in the emergency room. Otherwise, you may just end up as a case study in an international medical journal.
