An unhealthy entertainment.
In an issue of Surgical Endoscopy (1997) there was a report of an interesting surgical method of extracting swallowed toothbrushes. (Since they are never passed spontaneously, they must be removed one way or another surgically.) The toothbrushes were removed by passing a tube through the belly-button. This technique not only requires dexterity, but a certain amount of imagination. Who would have ever thought?
There were at that time over thirty known cases of swallowed toothbrushes! That was sixteen years ago. God knows how many more people have swallowed their toothbrushes since then. Once publicized, I am afraid swallowing toothbrushes may have become the next big thing. (Although not in the circles in which I travel. We still play music on vinyl recordings.)
I know of a case of a young man who injected peanut butter into a vein, but there was never a chance of that catching on, since it was fatal. (This was not just an unlucky coincidence. Shooting up peanut butter will always be fatal since it causes a fat embolism.) It is a bad idea for anyone without medical training to shoot up anything, including heroin—no matter what your friends may say.
This report of swallowed toothbrushes has haunted me since I first read it. Since then I have not been able to brush my teeth with the same heady abandon as had been my wont previously. I imagine, while I am brushing, that I will suddenly be overcome with the urge to experience that sexy feeling that comes from brushing the very back of the tongue—which is what I imagine all those tooth brushers were experiencing right before the toothbrush slipped carelessly from their grasp and, sneaking past the gag reflex, made its way into the stomach. (My gag reflex is the impulse to tell jokes whenever I hear of something awful and ridiculous, like 30 people lining up to swallow toothbrushes.)
It occurs to me now, thinking about it, that these people may have inadvertently swallowed their toothbrushes. Previously, I was misled, perhaps, by all those other examples of people sticking things into themselves for fun, usually of a sexual nature. I have written previously of a young man who liked swallowing bolts and screws and other things of a metallic nature. (See “Come One, Come All.”) There are other, truly strange, cases where men stick long needles into their groin area to encourage sexual arousal. (I have seen the X-rays.) I do not think such unusual cases can tell us anything more general about the human condition.
Much more common is the practice of inserting objects into the rectum in order to provide sexual excitement. (One such incident that had unfortunate consequences is reported in “The Seclusion Room.”) There are people who collect ribald stories of such outré practices, and these accounts have also been reported in the medical literature. Among objects that have been found in the rectum are, as you might expect, hairbrushes, broomsticks , and other such oblong objects. Also light bulbs of different wattages. In the days before routine x-rays, these discoveries in the operating room came as a surprise and were usually a source of amusement. But I remember one medical report of a frozen pig’s tail that was found in that place. Why a pig’s tail? Why frozen? Who freezes pig tails in the first place?
Very commonly, people insert probes of one sort into another in their ears, for obscure purposes, but not, I believe, for sexual reasons. When I was an interne, I took a cockroach form a child’s ear on more than one occasion; and I am sure the child did not insert the roach in his/her ear purposely. (By the way, the simplest way of treating the child is to pour ether into his/her ear which renders the roach unconscious and less likely to move about irritably during the process of removal.)
If, in fact, those people who swallowed their toothbrushes did so entirely without prurient intent—accidentally, as it were, I think there should be regulations promulgated to avoid any accidents of a similar nature in the future. Toothbrushes should be made with handles of at least ten inches in length, although given the vagaries of human nature, that would not be an absolute guarantee against further mishaps of this sort. (c) Fredric Neuman