Category: Kooks

Impaled on a Fence 33-year-old man somehow fell onto the top of a fence and impaled himself just to the side of his anus. He was admitted for observation but no surgery was needed. He was discharged the next day with expectation that he would make a full recovery. Weeks later, he returned to the…

The fontanelle is the “soft spot” on the top of a newborn baby’s head. It is where the bones of the skull have not fully formed and allows the head to compress as it passes trough the birth canal. It is usually gone by the first birthday. Here is a note from the chart of…

A 30-year-old man was eating a Steak Burrito Supreme at Taco Bell when he suddenly got a sharp pain in his throat, a choking sensation and inability to swallow. As time passed, he felt a bit better. He was able to take sips of water and talk but continued with severe pain and difficulty swallowing…

I had an interesting patient this last week: a lady I believe was bitten by a black widow spider. There are lots of black widows around. There were many empty lots around the house where I grew up in Sparks, Nevada. I used to go through those lots turning over rocks, boards and other junk.…

In medical school, they teach you about diseases. They teach you who is most likely to get a certain illness. You have to learn what kind of symptoms a person with that condition might have and what is found when examining such a patient. You learn how to put all of that together to make…

A patient has been visiting our emergency department a lot lately. He is a permanent resident of a psychiatric care facility and he likes to stick thinks in his rectum. The staff at the facility have to keep everything away from him or he will spirit it away and insert it. Fortunately, most of the…

As in so many areas of the country, we have a lot of trouble with methamphetamine abuse. It was not always so. Years ago, the drug of choice in our fair city was phencyclidine or PCP. It is what we refer to as a dissociative drug, meaning that it chemically disconnects the brain from the…

Quite a few people suffer from seizures because they have epilepsy. Other medical conditions can also cause seizures. For example, we frequently see alcohol withdrawal seizures since we see so many people with alcohol addiction. We recently had a patient with bad alcohol withdrawal symptoms. He was doing pretty well with the treatment we had…

A 35-year-old man was working for a tree trimming service. He was chipping tree branches when the chipper kicked back at him. A two-foot long palm frond impaled his right forearm. The medics transported him with the palm frond carefully fixed in the position in which they found it. He was taken to the operating…

When I approached a fifty-year old woman and asked her why she was had come to the emergency department, she handed me this note:   abdomen very swollen intense pain lower left abdomen below belly button area sensitive to touch low grade fever usually it runs btw 95.4 to 96.8, highest reading 100.08 occasional nauseasness…