A doctor's poker face

You think doctors see it all the time. The weird things, the sad things, the things that makes the general population squirm uncomfortably. But a misconception is that seeing those things don't effect them anymore. Believe me, they will react just as a pre-med student like me would.

Like when a patient comes into the ER with a cellphone charger cord in his penis for a month. I had to read the history and brief twice. "I have to get this one, Doc," I said to the ER doctor I refer to Mr. Rogers (for similarity reasons). He picked up the clipboard and read it. "Whaaaaat? Cell phone charger in his penis??" I replied with a "yea, lets go!" He rolled his eyes and we were off to Obs. 8.

We walked into the room, and Doc introduces himself with a "so I see you have quite a problem."

A throaty smoker's lung voice replied with a "yea, I've tried to wait this out long enough." I secretly chuckled at the non-intended pun. "So tell me how this all happened"

"Well, I've passed a few kidney stones before, and about 2 weeks after Christmas, I..."

"Two weeks after Christmas? This been in you for more than a month?"

"Well yea. I was just hopin' it'd come out eventually. Well, during that time, I felt a painful stone in my tallywacky..."

"Can you tell me what a tallywacky is?"

"My penis." "Uh huh...." My cheek muscles had to fight incredibly hard to fight the urge of laughter that would undoubtedly escape if I didn't have my lips pursed. I had a suspicion that Doc Rogers did that one on purpose.

"Well I figured that if I can push the stone back into my bladder, it can reorient itself and come out a little more comfortable. So I took a cell phone charger, and stripped the wire out of it.."

"So there's no wire in there."

"Naw, I'm not that stupid." The corners of my mouth twitched. "So I got myself erect, and started to put it in. I got it to hit the stone, and it was so painful that I kinda flinched and doubled over, and then I lost the damn thing! I eventually passed the stone, but the cord is still in there."

"Let me cover you up some, and feel around....Oh...yup, it's definately in there all right...Well let's get an x-ray of that, call the urologist, and we'll see where to go from there."

The x-ray came a few minutes later, and we found that the wire somehow rolled itself into a knot in the bladder. The urologist decided that it can't just be pulled out, but he will have to go in with an incision, cut it up with a laser, and then remove it. I asked how long the recovery time would be if that was the case, and he said 6 weeks. Doc Rogers said, "yea,...he'll be pissed." And we all finally erupted into laughter.

How did people get so stupid? Ahhh, good times in medicine.