D Sullivan Moore served as a volunteer in the hospital trauma unit as an emergency medical assistant. This is his story
of a strange case to which he was called one Friday night. A penis in a Coke Bottle. I won’t go into the details of the trauma unit on a Friday night, sufficient to say that we had 176
patients waiting treatment when I was called to the general theatre #1 where an unusual case awaited my attention. I had been writing my hand over notes as required by the hospital when Nadia, our circulating nurse, stuck her head into the room and informed me that I was needed in the unit. She looked rather amused, not her usual busy body, raise the dead look that she habitually wore in the unit. Between theatre #1 and theatre #2 was a sluice room and it was Nadia’s job to remove the dead patients from the working theatres and as best possible prepare the bodies for viewing by the next of kin who had come to identify them. The patients who had seen the medical officer and had their blue card endorsed with the treatment required joined the queue that would lead them to the theatre in time, usually a long time. In the theatre there were three tables for patients who could neither stand nor sit but had to be treated lying down and there were the two chairs for the more mobile patients. Of the 176 patients waiting attention the first 20 in the queue waited their turns while sitting in the theatre. In essence we felt as if we were on display, our every move being scrutinized by this “in theatre” crowd. I arrived to find a youngster of maybe 12 or 13 years of age sitting very still on one of the chairs, accompanied by his father. The majority of our patients spoke English but at the best of times we were never quite sure what the
Patient wanted. I asked what was wrong and glanced down at the blue card endorsed by the medical officer for the evening Dr. Emasses Govender-Sammy. The endorsement was exactly one word in length, “remove” I repeated the question and the patient pointed ever so briefly to the vicinity of his pants.. I had just finished gloving up and not wanting to break the sterile field that the gloves contributed to asked Nadia to find out what was wrong. The father was clearly annoyed to be sitting in the casualty at this time of night and gave his son a stinging clout on the side of his head. The youngster removed his shorts and there hanging from his penis was a Coke bottle, not one of the polyethylene bottles but a real glass bottle, the special edition marking some event in the life of the country. The blue card endorsement now made sense. Two things happened in rapid succession. Firstly one of the inebriated patients spotted the Coke bottle and hurried over to volunteer his expert advise on how to remove it. Soon the entire theatre was filled to maximum with people coming to look at this new decoration. The second thing that happened was the number of inebriates who came in to offer me their solutions which ranged from breaking the bottle with a hammer to cutting off the penis with a savage 9 inch bladed knife offered for the occasion by the very drunk owner. Both options would leave the owner unable to function in the marriage bed and were thus discarded. I tentatively tried to twist off the bottle but the owner indicated that the bottle was stuck on tight. I must confess to being baffled, and time was running out. Blood was clearly seeping into the penis but not escaping causing a pressure build up that was causing the owner extreme pain. Gangrene seemed to be a reality soon if I could not get the bottle off. The theatre hummed with stories of the penis and the odd places in which it had been found. One could not be sure if the stories related to the owners penis or to another one that had somehow gotten mixed up with a few other organs. Every now and then Mister Inebriate would come to inspect my progress which was exactly zero . He would then leave the patient with the wisdom that if he had to lose any piece of his anatomy it would not be his penis but then the patient saw it from a different view point. I then had an idea. I filled a 25 ml. syringe with a 50/50 soap and water solution and, bending the needle through 90 degrees was able to slide the thin needle between the organ and the constricting glass. Soon the soap began to flow around the trapped organ. With the soap solution almost finished I tentatively twisted and to my great relief after offering only a token of resistance the bottle twisted and slid off the penis. One would have thought that I had won the Nobel Prize so loud was the applause. And the patient ? Well he pulled up his shorts and hurried out into the cold night air.