Absolutely apocryphal, probably, but
a medic friend at college once talk me about an elderly gent who'd appeared in casualty one day in an ambulance. He was very polite, and explained very clearly to the nurse that he'd inserted an object into his rectum in an attempt to relieve the pain of an ongoing hernia problem. There are apparently procedures for the removal of such things, so very quickly a nurse and doctor team were busy with the forceps. They were a little shocked when they removed seemed to be an artillery shell of some kind, but the old gent said it was a war memento from when he was an anti-aircraft gunner. It was a training round, he said, and therefore he'd kept it on his desk for the last fifty years as a paperweight, and when the pain had started it has the nearest thing to hand. The patient, much relieved, was carted off for observation. In the meantime the shell had fallen over on a bench in the consulting room, and the triage nurse returned to find a foot-wide hole blown in the wall behind.
( Cromagnon Don't waste my motherfucking time!, Thu 2 Sep 2004, 21:28, Reply)