When a scientific area produces a large number of investigations, it is common practice for a review to be made. Well, at that point there has been a surprising field of surgery for a long time: that of the extraction of objects installed comfortably – or not so much – in the rectum. In 1986 the surgeons Busch and Starling published in Surgery Magazine the review Strange rectal objects. And the investigation has not stopped because in 2010 David M. Bunter published another in the same sense.
In 1986 doctors collected all the evidence disseminated by medical journals since the happy 1920s about foreign bodies lodged in people’s butts. In the 182 cases collected, we found that the most recurrent objects are bottles (32) and sexual devices such as vibrators and dildos (38) . Of course things start to get interesting when blunt knives, ice picks, jeweler’s saws, screwdrivers, balls – but tennis or baseball – and all kinds of vegetables with the right shape appear … or not, because there are also pears and onions . The aforementioned article also refers to vaginal foreign bodies and injuries to the large intestine due to practices such as fisting (which can be dangerous if not done carefully), colorectal instrumentation, pneumatic rupture, ingestion of foreign bodies, impalement and abdominal trauma.
Objects that have been housed there also appear because the poor bugger has unconsciously swallowed them. In this case the classics are pieces of wood and chicken bones , as reported in 1993 by the Canadian Journal of Surgery .
Of course, some of these lurid situations are funny, like the one Vaman S. Diwan reported in November 1982 in the Annals of Emergency Medicine (the name of the journal is funny … annals). A 54-year-old man came to the emergency room because, he told doctors, two days earlier he had been drinking bourbon and “did something” to his rectum. After the X-ray everything was clear and bright: I had a 100 W light bulb inserted in my butt . The good man in the end had to confess that while he was drunk with his colleagues, he had bet $ 100 that he could fit a lightbulb per save be the part. So dry stick? No: he used shaving foam as a lubricant. The article describes the careful technique that had to be followed to remove such a fragile object without destroying the rectum.
Of course, to curl the curl nothing like what doctors Peter J. Stephens and Mark L. Taff explained in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology: a cement enema . To summarize: a gay man, playing around, had introduced a mixture of cement into his partner’s anus and, as it took them more than 4 hours to go to the emergency room, the cement ended up forging in his rectum …
“True things, my cid.”
The vast majority of cases occur in males
More recently, in 2014, a meta-analysis was published that collected the conclusions of the reports published between 1980 and 2012 with the data available using the PubMed website and the keywords “rectal foreign body”.
A total of 589 cases were found, consisting of 556 male and 33 female patients with a mean age of 41 years.
Interestingly, 94.4% of the patients were men. The reports found a wide variety of objects, including bottles, vibrators, fruits, vegetables, tools, and miscellaneous items such as light bulbs, candles, balls, and flashlights.
Regarding treatment: the management of these cases varied from simple manual recovery, with or without general anesthesia, or the use of a sigmoidoscope. Eighty patients (13.6%) required surgery, although manual recovery was possible in the rest of the patients. Among patients who underwent surgery, stomata (artificial opening created surgically between a hollow viscus and the body surface) were created in 53 patients (66.2%).
On the other hand, the laparoscopic approach to aid in rectal removal of foreign bodies is a good treatment option for difficult cases, as it allows easy removal and detection of rectal lesions.
