Tales from the ER: Potato au Vagina

Man, I had quite a day. I'm going through my residency at a small hospital in West Virginia. The ER is pretty routine, but I had a patient tonight that I'll never forget. This old women comes in with groin pain. She said, and I quote, "I've got vines growin' out my ginnie". Upon closer inspection, I do indeed find vines growing out of her vulva. She had been using a potato as a pessary, which she had been using to treat a retroverted uterus. The warm, moist environment of her vagina provided the ideal conditions for the potato to sprout. The last thing I heard before I left was that she was going into surgery. I'll check on her tomorrow. What a night, huh?

Med Student
• This post is absolutely useless without pics.

• Yuck.

  Gisele%2C%20switching%20from%20potato%20to%20rice

• Emergency Situation: Tater!

• Tater Twat!

• I'm assuming the reason she did this is that she didn't have access to health care...

• Well aren't you an unprofessional little shit.

• OP, please provide us with enough information so we can send this post to your hospital's "med student" residents' supervisor. Frankly, I'm already ready to make a few guesses and make a few phone calls. Those of us in the profession are well aware of these sorts of issues - as someone noted, the woman may not have had insurance. She may not have had good sense. She may be practicing a folk remedy. But your tone, attitude and orientation to the issue makes me sicker than anything an elderly woman is going to insert to try to alleviate her pain. You are a disgrace, because, you asshole, you just had to make it all about you, didn't you? And it's not. Do her a big favor and do NOT "check on her tomorrow." No one here needs your unprofessional, oath-breaking updates on your little unforgettable case. Shameful.

  Medical%20Ethics%20Director

• Potato! Vagina! Vagino! Potata! Let's call the whole thing muff...

• This thread is useless without recipes.

• Oh, dear. Did you really think that nobody else in the whole wide world ever read Snopes, darling? Tsk tsk.

  http://www.snopes.com/medical/emergent/potato.asp

• You rock R10.

• You're no fun, R10

  R7

• Just don't eat the Tater Tots on the menu in the caffeteria tomorrow.

• I know that woman! This is a true story! It happened a couple of weeks ago. The sad thing is that the night she checked into the hospital was the night after her grandson's funeral. The poor guy had gotten bitten to death by a rattlesnake on a roller coaster. The snake was hiding under the seat and started attacking him after the ride started. Everyone thought his cries for help were because of the ride. It was really tragic because potato lady had raised him since he was born while his mother--her daughter--died in childbirth after suffering a fatal attack, along with his father, while she and the father were making out in the father's car on lover's lane. The killer, the hook-man, had recently escaped from a mental hospital.

• Well, I was willing to believe the story because I have witnessed and received advice about alleviating medical conditions that is downright weird . People with parents from the old country probably have often do. The one that stands out in my mind is the advice a friend's mother from the old country gave her after sinus surgery. That she needed to insert [italic]chicken fat[/italic] into her nasal passages to speed up the healing. Uh, huh. Closed environment near the brain, unsterile chicken fat...

  R5

• *probably often do.

• Two I can think of, man with a 12" dildo stuck up his rectum...went to surgery. A man with his penis stuck in a vacuum cleaner. A man shut his dick in his sliding glass door.

• SPY Magazine once had a sidebar feature of interesting things reported to have been lodged in orifices by ER physicians. They came from an article in some medical journal. The standout: An old deer tounge a woman had been using to pleasure herself. The description of the tongue was ghastly. Purple, bluish ick.

• Pretty weird. I've heard of vegtables being stuck in both men and women.

• People like R10 are the reason Datalounge is no fun anymore. Do you also go around telling little kids there's no Santa Claus, R10?

• R17, Penises stuck in vacuum cleaners is actually pretty common to ER doctors, as well as the "reasons" given of how it occurred. An example, "I was vacuuming naked, because it was so unbearably hot, and the nozzle attacked my penis."

• I'd rather people like R10 than people like OP trying to play us for fools.

• Thank you, R22! It's irritating when people like OP try to pass off widely circulated Internet folklore as a personal anecdote. People may whine about me being "no fun" all they want, but I just cannot let people get away with this sort of thing!

• (and kisses to R11 and R14!)

  R10

• OP, did you also treat the woman whose vagina was infested with mud shrimp after masturbating with a lobster?

  http://www.snopes.com/risque/juvenile/lobster.asp%23hotdog

• That shrimp was NEVER in my vagina, R25.

  Katie%20Holmes

• In my real world of hospital work, it's men stowing things up the craphola who show up in the ER. The two most memorable items -- a huge carrot and a 1960s television tube. In 1982, a young man came in with a tube from an ancient television up his butt. We assumed the tv must have been in his grandparents basement or something. He claimed he had no idea how or when it got up there. In 1991, one of our orderlies came running in to our surgical recovery area saying, "I never seen anything like it! They just ... this guy... they had to do a colonoscopy ... a carrot as big as my forearm!" he held his beefy forearm in front of us. We did not believe him, so went into the hospital computer. Sure enough, there was a surgical report for the man who had just been sent from the OR to a medical floor. Procedure: Colonoscopy under Sedation. Specimen(s): One large carrot. I printed it out (tore the name of the patient off the top of the page) to show my friend who was always regaling us with his ER stories.

• My eyes!

  The%20Potato

• Now THOSE were some insatiable bottoms, R27!

• It's my opinion, that most guys don't like BIG things up there.

• OP, are you a med student doing rotations or a resident? If you're an Emergency Medicine resident, you'd better to get used to seeing strange things. And I'm guessing a "small hospital in West Virginia" was not your first choice for your clinical experience.

• Well you do R10. I had to say it.

  R11

• Back at you R10/R24!

  R14--I%20hope%20I%20got%20all%20this%20right.%20

• Hey guys, thanks for all the responses. I visited Potato Lady tonight. Got some bad news. She swallowed some watermelon seeds this past summer, and now a watermelon is growing in her stomach. We're going to have to perform surgery to remove it. I lost my first patient today. A young woman came in the ER by ambulance. She had just gotten married. Her body temperature was 109. She was just burning up. Apparently, she wanted to look her best for her wedding. She believed in having a nice healthy glow, and she liked to go to tanning salons at least once a week, sometimes more. Well, with all the preparation for the wedding, she had let a few weeks go by, and she thought she was kind of pasty. With her wedding approaching, she wanted to look as radiant as possible, so she started tanning at her local salon every day. The tanning salon told her she was tanning too much and basically cut her off. Her wedding was the next day, and she wasn't satisfied, so she went to every tanning salon in town and tanned FIVE times in one day! She looked great on her wedding day. The next day, while on a fun Carnival cruise with her hubby, her husband complained of a rotting meat smell. This smell only got worse, and it seemed to radiate from every orifice of her body. He said her breath was horrendous and that her vagina failed to produce adequate lubrication during love-making. As the cruise went on, she got progressively weaker and smellier, and as soon as she got of the ship, she collapsed. Her skin was flaking off, her lips were chapped, and her hair was like straw and falling off in clumps, but the worst part was the horrible smell. Despite everything we could do, she died at 12:34 p.m. When pathalogy performed the autopsy, they said her insides were cooked like hamburger. She had cooked herself alive with all that tanning! Man, I need a drink.

  Med Student

• I heard this story 30 years ago. It was told to me by a med student who was punking my naive teen self. The only difference is the vageen line. In his version, a backwoods woman said, "I have leaves in my Virginia."

  Can%27t%20believe%20I%20beleafed%20that

• ER Bump

• It's amazing how long urban legends can stick around.

• The penis-stuck-in-vacuum thing makes me wonder: how do the keep the vacuum running on the way to the ER?

• In the dessert round, your ingredients are gummy worms, capers, vaginal potatoes, and Geoduck!

• Upon further reflection, geoduck and vaginas look a lot alike...ew. "I'LL SHOW YOU SOME GOOEY FUCKING DUCK, BITCH! LICK MY CLITTY!" *shudder*

• Wouldn't a dick shrink and then easily be removed from a vacuum?

• r7 needs to take the giant pessary out of his ass.