I was going to sit down and write about how quite recently a nurse told me that it was not in my scope of practice to assess bleeding. Then I realized it was entry number sixty nine and well the number conjures up thoughts of genital injuries.
Genital injuries and the insertion of various objects into the rectum are great fodder for ER and EMS types. In fact the subject of objects inserted rectally has it's own book:
This dear readers is about genital injuries. Now I won't talk about genital injuries sustained during a sexual assault. Those are a sensitive subject and Crusty takes those rather seriously. Male genital injuries are more common because hey let's face it our anatomy hangs out. Again, this is easy fodder for those of us in the business. Less common are the female genital injuries that are not related to sexual assault.
I was trying to remember a real rare genital injury and then I remembered the home bar stool accident.
Way back when I was a new ER Tech I assisted a doc with a woman with lacerations to her vaginal wall secondary to sitting on a home bar stool.
Pt was a mid-50's female. Nice woman. Her husband a few years prior made their basement a home bar with taps televisions pool table and such things that normal bars have including bar stools. The bars tools they had were of the four legged padded top types the ones that you can find in discount furniture stores all across our great nation. The stools got wobbly over the years and the husband said soon they would buy newer better ones. The wife being "thrifty"(cheap) decided to fix the stools herself when the husband was off at work, she got home early and wanted to surprise him with the repairs.
She grabs his portable drill and what screws she can find which if I remember right would have been 2 or 3 inch drywall screws. She screws the legs into the top of the seated portion of the stools which takes the wobble out. She's proud of herself pours up a beer turns on the TV behind the bar and sits onto one of the newly "repaired" stools and it collapses once she puts her full weight on it. She was not a hefty woman, she was weight to size appropriate.
Naturally this hurt then the woman discovered she was bleeding from what she thought was her behind. She thought the screws came up and poked her in the ass. Which honestly I would have thought the same thing. Problem is that she's bleeding a lot. She goes into the bathroom drops her pants and looks in the mirror no holes in her ass besides the ones she already had.
Then she notices that there is blood running down her leg from her vagina. No she was not preggers and lost the baby. She feels inside her vagina and feels the laceration in her vaginal wall. She runs out of the bathroom wraps a sheet around her waist and calls the ambulance. Which of course brings the police and fire too. What can I say it was a slow day in this particular suburb.
Husband pulls up as they are wheeling her out and asks what's going on all he hears is that his wife's genitals are injured and sees the police. The cops assure him that there was a strange accidnet and his wife will explain. Which she does once they get to the hospital.
Ended up that she had a couple of decent lacs to her vaginal wall secondary to a lot of embarrassment. I had to assist the doc in the lac repair. The couple had some humor about it but the wife was clearly mortified.
The husband and wife decided that night to use the stools for fire wood and buy nice top of the line stools instead for future use. Thus endeth the story.
Next the willfully ignorant Nurse Bass.
