What’s Stuck Where?!
A Survey of the Strangest Foreign Bodies Removed in the ER
When people ask for a good ER story, they usually mean one thing:
“Tell me about something weird someone got stuck in an orifice.”
Fine.
In my fifteen years in emergency medicine, I’ve seen foreign bodies in every body cavity. Let’s be honest—I’d rather deal with chest pain than a foreign body case any day. Nothing good ever comes from putting things where they don’t belong.
Let’s start simple: the eye.
Fairly common, generally boring. A speck of metal, maybe a piece of sawdust. Who hasn’t felt like something was stuck in their eye at some point?
Mouth & throat: slightly more interesting.
Airway obstructions. Meat lodged in the esophagus. The occasional impaction we fish out with a scope.
Then there are the phantoms—people convinced they swallowed a fish bone. There’s never a fish bone. Just a scratch, and Google-induced panic.
The purposeful swallowers.
Batteries. Razor blades. Attention-seeking missiles.
And the drug mules, brought in under police escort after airport scans light up with swallowed bags of cocaine. The officers eye you like you’re a magician: “Can’t you just… pull it up?”
No. We watch. We wait. We sift through stool.
Now for the crowd favorite: rectal foreign bodies.
The “I fell on it” brigade.
Bottles. Flashlights. Dildos. Even rodents. You name it.
The real issue isn’t what they inserted—it’s the vacuum seal that forms and slurps it higher into the rectum. Getting it out often requires conscious sedation, elbow grease, and a strong stomach.
Genital packers? A mixed bag.
Women panicked about a lost tampon and impending toxic shock because they Googled it.
Men who broke a Foley catheter and now have a balloon in their bladder.
And the guy who inserted a chopstick into his urethra.
I don’t know why. I stopped asking why.
External entrapments: actually my favourite.
A ring trapped on a swollen finger, cutting off its circulation.
The penis stuck in a constriction device that now requires bolt cutters.
Or the guy with his tongue stuck in a glass bottle. He just had to get that last drop. Ended up nasally intubated and sent to the OR to have the bottle cracked off his tongue.
Implanted foreign bodies—the medical kind.
Pacemakers. Defibrillators. VP shunts. Breast implants that pop. Penile implants that get infected.
They weren’t exactly put in for fun… well, except maybe a couple of them—but when they fail, they can still cause plenty of chaos.
I’ve seen people with malfunctioning defibrillators—wires in their chest and terror in their eyes, knowing that at any moment, their heart could be rocked by a jolt so strong it makes them forget who they are.
That’s why we keep a giant magnet around.
Not for science. For mercy.
In the end, foreign body cases are part comedy, part tragedy, and part pure human curiosity gone wrong.
Every ER doc has stories like this. But somehow, patients keep finding new and inventive things to get stuck inside themselves.
Mike, I love reading your articles. I’m a general internist at a community type hospital. I’m shocked at your description of ER MDs doing thorocotomies, crics, scope
My best friend is a nurse practitioner. She has similar stories. I've never understood the guy who squeezed quick dry cement into his rectum. It would not come out. He died after several operations. Btw, he was a sheriff.