As A Surgeon, What Is The Strangest Thing You Have Found Inside Someone While Performing A Surgery?

This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Anne Bergwall, Retired Anesthesiologist.



I’m an anesthesiologist, not a surgeon. I was able to participate in and observe the surgical process thousands of times without having to scrub and gown!

The strangest thing found inside someone, and believe me there have been plenty of strange things, was what was found inside a 23-year-old male (Dale) with a bowel obstruction.

Dale was so obstructed that nothing was passing through his gut. He was vomiting, was in exquisite pain and unfortunately for all involved, was a horrible historian. Dale couldn’t tell us when he last ate, pooped, or when he started feeling badly. It could have been days, a week, or hours. He had no idea.

He was brought to the ER by his boss, a restaurant manager. The boss told us that Dale lived in an adult residence for people with cognitive challenges. A quick telephone call to his facility yielded no additional information except that Dale had no known allergies and took no medications, and no, no one had noted anything “off” about him of late.

Clearly Dale had peritonitis; he was febrile with a very tender belly and demonstrated free air on abdominal X-ray. Something, somewhere in his gut had perforated, spilling gas and gut contents into the abdominal cavity. AND the X-ray looked weird. Stool impaction? Maybe? Foreign body? If so, what would cause that appearance? We were all puzzled — the radiologist, surgeon and I.

There were no non-surgical options for our patient, so off to the OR we go. The usual procedures ensue and the bowel is run — the process whereby the surgeon inspects the bowel for anomalies, damage and/or perforations, and repairs the bowel. While the surgeon is having fun operating, I’ve got my hands full trying to keep Dale alive and anesthetized. He is sick as poo, septic and hypotensive. I’m pouring fluids and pressors into a bottomless pit of hypotension wishing that my surgical colleague would just hurry up and fix the problem already. But there he is, Sherlock Holmesing the bowel. Then I hear the surgeon exclaim, “Holy S#IT!” and time just stops along with my heart.

Surgeon, “What the Hell is this? Anne look at this! What the H!?” These are not the usual exclamations this surgeon utters over the surgical field. Alarmed, I peek over the sterile screen and observe my surgical colleague teasing, then tugging, and finally pulling a poop-encrusted ropelike foreign body out of the colon. And he.keeps. pulling. AND PULLING. Whatever it was, there were feet, no, yards of it. It was black, slimy and NASTY. After what seemed like ages, the foreign body is completely removed, packaged up and sent for pathological analysis. It is 3:00am and now time has expanded infinitely. We wait for the pathologist to call.

RING!

“OR 2, let me put you on speaker”

“Hey, it’s Bob (pathologist) here. This is a very interesting case.”

(Drum roll, please)

“The foreign body is comprised of 2 black plastic trash bags linked together at the perforations. The total length is 110 inches. Incidental findings include a carrot and a corn cob both in entirety. Do you need anything else? All right then.”

CLICK

Note: Pathologists can be very dry, especially at 3:00am.

To this day I don’t know what possessed Dale to ingest those trash bags, nor can I imagine how that feat was accomplished, let alone how someone could take in an entire corn cob or carrot. All I can say is that Dale was made of Hefty stuff and we were all Glad that he made it!


It was also answered by Vivek Bojjawar, Cardiac surgeon, Manipal hospitals, Bengaluru


I am a heart surgeon, so for me to anything ingested is extremely extremely rare.

A 27 year old chap had presented to our ENT surgeon complaining Of neck and throat pain for the last 2 months.

Apparently this young chap had ingested a piece of iron wire about 5 cm long in an inebriated state 2 months back. When the ENT surgeon could not find the wire in the throat or esophagus he asked for xray which showed a wire somewhere in the upper chest.

CT Scan showed this wire was lying in the mediastinum near the arch of aorta, between carotid arteries. So the wire had penetrated the esophagus (food pipe) migrated down and was found nestled near the aortic arch. Crazy location and no where close to the food pipe.






And was also answered by Howard Lynch.


A number of years ago, I was running one of our surgical lasers for a urologist and during the case, he told a story about an interesting surgery he performed.

A woman came into his office as a new patient. She filled out the usual paperwork, which asks about health history and any past surgical procedures. I don’t remember all the details but he eventually had to perform a procedure on her which involved putting a scope up her ureter.

So the day of the surgery comes, she’s put under, and the doctor puts the scope in her urethra and proceeds to make his way to the bladder, only to find something very unexpected.

A prostate.

Long story short, the woman was post-op transgender, but apparently didn’t think it was important to convey this information to her doctor.

After the surgery, he explained to her the importance of providing her FULL health history as it would allow him to provide the best care possible.

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