How do you remove a sex toy stuck inside a man's rectum?
This was the clinical conundrum that confronted surgeons at Dublin's Mater Misericordiae University Hospital last December. As they , a "68-year-old man presented to the emergency department with severe lower abdominal discomfort, distension and inability to pass urine, flatus, or bowel motions. He had inserted a phallic object in the rectum 10 hours prior to presentation and had been unable to remove same."
This was not the unfortunate man's first time at this particular rodeo. "In 2006, he had presented with lower back pain following insertion of a foreign object into the rectum," the authors note. "This was successfully removed under sedation by bi-manual manipulation."
Doctors tried to remove the 23 centimeter-long object -- see the X-ray pictured above -- in the emergency department, but that didn't work. "Therefore, it was necessary to remove the object using a bi-manual technique in the lithotomy position under general anaesthesia in the operating theatre." The position of the sex toy was such that removing it required the use of a Magill's forceps, similar to what the authors refer to as a "cork in bottle technique" that had been previously described.
The patient did just fine. As the authors note, "Extraction of rectal foreign bodies requires ingenuity."
Hat tip: Adam Marcus