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On the latest episode of Armchair Expert, hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman interviewed emergency room workers who removed surprising objects from patients’ rectums
The guests shared that diet soda cans are common, but one removed a Barbie doll
Still another treated a patient who had a can of butane in their rectum — which complicated removal as the gas is combustible
Dax Shepard and co-host Monica Padman spoke to medical professionals on the June 20 episode of Armchair Expert. about the strange — and dangerous — things ER staff have removed from patients’ rectums.
The first guest, a nurse practitioner named Kim, says she treated a patient who complained of constipation. Following the initial exam, she said, “After working in this field for so long, I’m instantly like, ‘What’d you put up there, bud?’ ”
Kim shared that Diet Dr. Pepper is the “no. 1 soda up the poop shoot,” saying it’s “very common” to remove cans of soda. That’s what she was expecting to find, but as Kim shared, when she and her partner did a rectal exam, “staring back at me are two of the most perfect doll feet ever … you know what Barbie’s feet look like. You’ve seen Barbie feet. They’re just so perfect. So these two little beautiful feet are just staring back at us.”
Christoph Schmidt/picture alliance via Gett
Stock image of Barbie running for office.
The patient insisted, “I didn’t put it up there. Somebody might have, but I didn’t put it up there.“
“I go to pull just gently on these two little perfect feet. It’s tight. It’s not coming out of there,” Kim said, explaining that because he inserted the doll with her arms down, “anytime we try to pull, her little arms aren’t forgiving or letting her out.”
He needed to undergo surgery to remove the doll — during which Kim says they were horrified to learn, “it’s not just Barbie … It’s President Barbie. He desecrated the most powerful woman in the free world and put it up his rear end.”
When the patient had to use an ostomy bag — an external bag to collect feces — to let his bowel recover from surgery, Kim shared that “the ‘Vote for Barbie’ pin came out of the ostomy.”
Another guest, emergency room doctor Toby, shared that he saw an “intense dude” who looked “haggard from the night before.”
As the patient shared, his evening had involved a “whole lot of cocaine. And then in his words, a bunch of hookers … He said, ‘At some point in the night, things got carried away, and I ended up with something in my ass.’ “
An x-ray showed a 12-oz. aluminum can. Removing such an object is “like when you drop your cell phone down the side of your car seat,” Toby explained. “You can jam your hand, like, deep down there, and you can actually touch it, but you can’t pick it up.”
That was the case; they couldn’t remove the can.
When Tony and his team realized the man had inserted the can upside down and the resident could feel the soda tab, Toby said, “We open it up, and it’s just this river of cola foam, blood, and micro turds … it lasted forever.”
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty
Stock image of Diet Dr. Pepper cans.
The patient was able to have the can removed, but in this case, it was Coke Zero: “I love the idea of the guy party planning the day before going, like, ‘Well, got the cocaine, I’m gonna get the hookers.’ His idea of harm reduction was getting diet soda.”
But the object that was potentially the most dangerous was shared by a former ER tech, Danielle, who said the patient, who initially complained of knee pain, admitted, “I actually have something in my butt.”
“I was in the garage, and it’s a can of butane,” the patient told Danielle.
“Explosive,” Shepard commented.
Getty
Stock image of a can of butane.
Danielle said that while she’s encountered glass beer bottles and shampoo bottles, “I never had a combustible compressed gas.” Specifically, “a very large can of butane.”
Upon seeing a picture, Shepard said, “It’s gotta be 14 inches,” comparing it to a rolling pin.
The patient had to undergo surgery, bumping all other “semi-emergent cases.” The cauterizing device commonly needed for this type of surgery couldn’t be used due to the risk of explosion. “When you have a can of butane in your butt, you cannot use that. So the surgery takes much longer and it’s way more complicated,” Danielle said.
“That’s one stop short of coming in and saying, I have a stick of TNT in my ass,” Shepard said. “We live in a wild world.”
To remove the butane, they had to go in through the abdomen.
“Keep some of the objects out of your butt for crying out loud or tie a string to it,” Shepard said. “Have some f—king contingency plan.”
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