Fishing

I am on GI consults for the next two weeks. We are the ones you call when your patient is in the hospital and for whatever reason, needs a colonoscopy. Or, as was the case for the poor man we consulted on on Monday, you swallow your dentures and need emergent upper endoscopy. We (by we I mean our fellow and attending, I stood in the corner and watched) spent 90 minutes trying to fish the dentures out of this man's esophagus. I'm not sure how he got them down in the first place, because they were very poorly designed for passage through the GI tract. It was a partial, so there were two teeth on one side, with an acrylic bridge on the other side. There were two opposite facing metal hooks on either end to secure the thing in place. Unfortunately, the hooks were also perfectly positioned to snag on the mucosa as we tried to pull it up. We ended up pushing it down into the stomach and leaving it there for the surgeons to work their magic.

It's actually really cool stuff. If I didn't hate all of the body fluids involved in this specialty, and hadn't already committed myself to a life without overnight call or any emergencies, I'd be all about GI. It's like playing video games involving people's colons. Luckily for you all, there will be no pictures accompanying this post. But if you are really curious, try looking up "endoscopy foreign body removal" on google images. It's amazing what people will swallow.