Episode 9 Bizarre ER

'Emergency...'

With mind-boggling medical mishaps,

and the quirkiest of casualties.

My boyfriend dropped a turnip on my foot.

This is Bizarre E.R.

'So come on!'

And for the first time, we've camped out in not one but two British hospitals -

Northampton General and Bradford Royal Infirmary.

Hello.

To bring you the curious cases, that are all in a day's work for the stoic staff.

Can you see your pound coin there?

But which have to be seen to be believed.

Oh! Phew...

Plus we've scoured the planet for the people who, thanks to amazing medics,

have survived the most extraordinary accidents and emergencies known to man.

Nobody believes they're going to get the Black Death.

So scrub up, sit back and enjoy the sometimes silly,

often odd but never dull world of Bizarre E.R.

-All I can say is thank heavens for the NHS.

-Thank you.

Coming up - a weird wound proves too much for one woodsman.

There's a casualty that's literally eye-watering.

I can see light - that's a good thing.

Plus the mind-boggling story of how this woman broke her neck after

falling from a New Mexico mountain and yet lived to tell us her tale.

When people fall straight down 20ft that's when terrible damage occurs to the human body,

and she fell 3 times that far.

First we're heading to Northampton where budding builder Lewis King

has come to A&E, not like most brickies with a pencil tucked neatly behind the ear,

bizarrely, he's stuffed his little scribbler inside his shell-like.

My grandson has put a pencil down his ear

and it has broken in the ear

but it was a week before he told us he did that.

Staff need to get to the point fast as the pencil lurking

in Lewis' lughole is potentially more serious than you'd think.

The worst-case scenario is a deep-rooted infection

and then that can affect his hearing, balance, co-ordination

and if left long enough could even go deaf with it.

How big was the pencil?

That big - that big - smaller?

So just a tiny bit then? OK.

Dr Phillip's confident that retrieving the piece of pencil will be a piece of cake.

So nice and still for me.

But drawing it out proves more difficult than he hoped.

Well, he's done a good job of it, I'll tell you that.

After a fair bit of prodding and poking, the pencil - or is it?

Is that all of it or just part of it?

That's all of it, I think - yeah, that's all of it.

Let's have a look in your ear - that looks like a watch battery to me.

-Battery?

-You sure it was a pencil?

Don't think it actually was one.

Where he would have got that from and how it's got in there, I do not know.

Dr Phillip has a quick look to see if there's nothing else in the ear -

a compass, protractor, the odd AA battery.

You're doing really well, Lewis.

Lewis's earhole might be unblocked but it's not all good news for our battery-operated boy.

Right - I can't see your eardrum, which means it's gone,

which means you've made a hole in it. OK?

Now that can happen with things like this so it's important

we don't do anything to repair it or anything, it will repair itself.

Lucky for Lewis the eardrum is much like skin and should grow back naturally over the next 6 weeks.

I'll get rid of that for you. Give it a wash when you get home.

He might have lost an eardrum but Lewis has gained a nice souvenir of his time in A&E,

and learnt a valuable lesson.

It's been a bit of an eye-opener for Dr Phillip too.

The fact that he said it was a pencil and it turned out to be a watch battery -

I'd say that was pretty bizarre.

Gran takes little Lewis back to Mum. Let's hope she doesn't give him an earful when he gets home.

Next tonight we're welcoming a new surgeon to Northampton General,

but this one's arrived as a patient and not staff.

Tree surgeon Jim Saunders has come to A&E after a weird woodland run-in.

I got this caught in the log splitter at work.

Wasn't thinking for a split-second and before I know it,

I'm dragging my finger out and pulling my glove off and there's blood everywhere.

Luckily for Jim, emergency nurse practitioner Graham Seaton is on hand to tend to the diced digit.

-You're a tree surgeon, I take it?

-Yeah.

To find out how much damage has been done by Jim's handshake with a log splitter,

Graham first checks out his X-rays.

Hopefully the X-ray will be good news.

His X-ray on the middle phalanx, just a fracture through the middle there.

The problem being is that he's got a wound as well as the fracture.

OK.

-Well, I've had a look at your X-ray James, you've got a fracture down there also.

-Bollocks.

It's not the news Jim was hoping for, he'll have to go up to theatre so surgeons can get a closer look

at the fractured finger and possibly operate to repair the injury.

Not happy - not happy.

But before that Graham needs to do a quick patch-up job -

all the filth of the forest could have wormed its way into Jim's digit,

which could lead to nasty infections and even blood poisoning.

Graham begins by washing the wound while enjoying a bit of small talk.

-This a busy time of the year for you, is it?

-Yeah, yeah, very busy.

Anyway, were you local today?

Yeah.

Next, Graham disinfects the digit with iodine, giving Jim a chance to practise his human beat box routine.

Ah! Bbbb-rrrr. Jesus! Prrr...

Graham then injects local anaesthetic to numb the pain,

and there's more vocal gymnastics from Jim.

Ah. I hate this stuff.

And finally Graham stitches up the open wound so nothing undesirable can take root in Jim's finger.

With Graham's work done, Jim heads up to the ward to wait for surgery,

where our tree lover feels strangely at home.

I like the name Cedar, it's my favourite tree so I'm happy here.

Jim takes root in the hospital for a couple of days before being sent up to the theatre,

where his finger got a more thorough clean.

Luckily he didn't need surgery.

His finger's been sewn back up and fitted with a Zimmer splint -

a padded aluminium strip that will help the fracture heal.

In a couple of months Jim's green fingers will be fit for the forest again.

It's not as painful now as it was earlier,

just got to keep it upright and, erm,

hopefully it will heal. I'm pleased - I really am pleased.

For now Jim's girlfriend Casey arrives to take him home,

which means our wounded woodsman can finally make like a tree and LEAF - hah!

Like Jim, we all sometimes need a helping hand from a nurse,

who's widely considered to be the angel of the hospital.

But down the ages the job has been

done by both saints and sinners.

For centuries many nurses were employed purely for their breasts -

"wet nurses" were taken on to suckle the young of wealthy mums,

who had better things to do

than breastfeed and bring up their babies.

What we think of as nursing used to be done by monks and nuns

until Henry VIII decided to close down all the monasteries.

Following that, patients had to contend with

some very, very naughty nurses.

Tending to the sick in the 17th century was no job for a lady.

It was dirty work and with no NHS, there was no pay.

So the job fell to the lowliest in society.

Prisoners were made to swap swag for swabs and even prostitutes

would spend time walking the wards rather than walking the streets.

-Cheers, darling.

-The woman who made nursing respectable was Florence.

# You've got the love to see me through... #

Although she didn't have a machine.

Florence Nightingale came back to Blighty after tending to

the walking wounded in the Crimean War

determined to give nursing a good name.

Both the outfit and the job have changed a lot since Florence,

but the naughty nurse hasn't disappeared altogether

as one Newcastle-based nurse proves.

Hello!

She was struck off in 2006

after she drew a smiley face on an MRSA sufferer's hernia,

and placed the false eye of another patient into a glass of Cola

-before offering it to the Ward Sister.

-Aah!

Naughty, naughty nursey.

Next we're heading to Bradford Royal Infirmary where a bizarre toilet-related trauma

has landed Brian Silson in A&E.

You see Brian hasn't injured his nether regions but his leg,

and he wasn't in the bathroom when this all happened, but the garden.

-Brian.

-That's me.

Dutiful son Brian was doing a spot of DIY for his mum -

-knocking up a few shelves in the shed.

-No problem, Mum.

While lugging a bit of MDF across the garden, Brian failed to spot a discarded throne

that Mum had chucked out years before and plunged his leg straight into the lav,

losing his grip on the plank.

But a bash to the bonce was the least of his worries.

Once indoors Brian realised that it was the cut from the khazi

that had done him the serious damage so hobbled at speed to A&E.

Brian, be a love and clean up the carpet when you get back.

More squeamish viewers might want to take a loo break now

before Brian reveals the damage done by his peculiar porcelain slipper.

Better to get it all stitched up cos I don't like the look of my own muscle moving about.

Lifting the lid on Brian's bog blunder is emergency nurse practitioner Sam Waterhouse.

I take it this toilet has been used?

Oh, yeah, it's been ripped out of a bathroom. Yeah, it is. Yeah.

We all hate it when a trip to the toilet results in a slash on the leg,

but Brian's injuries are especially worrying as the dirty dunny will be riddled with harmful bacteria,

which could lead to severe blood poisoning.

I can't see any toilet in there but we'll get an X-ray just to make sure you've got nowt floating about.

Concerned there are bits of bog still in the wound, Sam sends Brian for X-rays,

which are inspected by Dr Sara Edmondson.

We're looking for any foreign bodies and these would show up white, like of the bone,

but, as you see, there isn't any foreign bodies.

While there aren't any foreign bodies there could well be masses of germs, including tetanus.

So Brian will need a couple of jabs to prevent infection,

including the mighty Hattie, which combats any toxins caused by tetanus just in case it's already set in.

It would be in his interests to have the Hattie,

but, erm, it's a big needle, goes in his bottom.

I do have a fear of needles.

He's not going to like it at all.

Are you ready, Brian? Right where do you want it first, arm or bottom?

-We'll do your bottom first.

-Just the word "needle".

You'll just feel a sharp prick, OK?

How was that?

-I were fine with that.

-OK?

-Yeah.

I wish they were all like that, you know what I mean?

Brian's needle nightmare isn't over yet.

After a jab to the arm, the leg wounds need to be stitched up, which means local anaesthetic

followed by yes, more needles.

Painful, is it, Brian?

It's quite hard to pull the edges together.

By our count, brave Brian's had to endure 32 punctures and piercings this evening,

which mean medics have not only managed to lace up his leg -

they've probably cured his fear of needles, too.

Feeling a lot better now - now it's closed up, anyway.

Finally Brian's free to go without having had chance to finish off his DIY chores.

Although it turns out Mumsey decided it might be safer if she put up the shelves in the shed herself.

While toilets are a haven of tranquillity for some,

each year a staggering 15,000 people come a cropper on the crapper.

Ouch!

Over half of all accidents are caused

by mishandling mobiles mid-stool.

Such was the case of the 26-year-old traveller in France who,

while trying to retrieve his phone, was dragged down the dunny,

and had to be stretchered away with the pan still attached.

Francois, I shall call you back I have had a really crappy day.

More bizarre still

are the bogs that blow up.

In January 2010 it was reported

that one toilet tripper's lit cigarette ignited the methane

produced by decomposing waste in a public loo in Ghana.

The explosion blew off the poor fella's "little fella"

and caused serious damage

to his nether regions.

Unlike in more tropical climes,

we don't have as many creepy crawlies lurking in our lavs,

but that doesn't mean

other predators aren't prowling the porcelain.

As Maxine Killingback from Deptford found out.

While giving the rim a rinse, she was savaged by a rat.

Ey! There's a bleeding rat down the khazi.

But not all loos are potentially lethal.

In fact in Japan you can find talking toilets

that diagnose health problems based on your urine's blood sugar.

Your wee is good.

Or by measuring body fat by sending a mild electric charge through your bum cheeks by the seat.

Time to go, fatso.

Who needs a GP when you've got a WC?

I have not finished!

Beyond Bradford there's a great big world of bizarre accidents.

In this series we've scoured the globe to bring you the most extraordinary emergencies on Earth.

Across the pond in New Mexico, a hiking trip turned to horror,

when one woman, while lost on a mountain, took a 200ft tumble

that should have finished her off, but bizarrely, didn't.

Sports scientist Gilly Mara is the sporty outdoor type.

Sport has been my life for years,

ever since the age of about sort of 12 or 13.

She even qualified for the British Canoeing team.

It's a way of being free, actually.

I couldn't be without being in a boat.

You might think Gilly's love for the outdoors would be good for her health.

In fact it nearly killed her when, in a terrifying mountain tumble, she broke her neck.

I'd say she is one of the luckiest people I'd ever seen.

Walking with a friend in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, USA,

all Gilly wanted was to watch the famous sunset from the high mountain ridge.

I thought it would be nice to go for a walk, spend the day outside, cos it was nice warm weather.

I'm in shorts and in a swimsuit, believe it or not.

It just wasn't their lucky day and they soon lost the trail.

It can be very treacherous,

there's cliffs everywhere.

It's very steep and rugged.

it's not something that you would take your grandmother on, for sure.

-It's dangerous.

-With each footstep I think sort of we'd put ourselves into a worse and worse position.

Completely lost, blundering through the wilderness,

they were exhausted and panic set in.

I think it was beyond panic, actually, to be honest.

Either we were in floods of tears

or I was just trying to kind of calm myself down and talk to myself.

In desperation, they started to climb across the face of the mountain, looking for a way down.

I was very much out of my depth and we'd started climbing and I'm not a climber.

Now very weak, Gilly came to the horrific realisation

that for her there was only one way off the mountain.

I knew I couldn't hold on for much longer

and I called out to my friend and said, "I'm sorry, I can't hold on."

And then I...I let go.

Gilly fell 60ft down the sheer cliff face, smashing against the rock.

I hit the floor on my back and kind of rolled and then sort of tossed into the air.

When people fall straight down 20 feet, that's when terrible damage occurs to the human body -

broken arms, broken legs, broken back.

20 feet is about the limit and she fell three times that far.

The impact was like a major car crash.

Then Gilly tumbled on another 140 feet, strike after strike, crash after crash.

On the sixth sort of time I hit the ground I just stopped. Everything was just quiet.

The miracle was - she was alive.

I sort of started moving my right hand up to my hairline

and it felt quite sticky - I realised I was actually touching my skull.

I slightly moved my right leg, and a big sort of shooting pain went up.

Huge amount of pain, pain you can't even describe.

X-rays revealed that Gilly's agony was caused by a broken pelvis.

The pelvis is a tremendously difficult bone to break.

You usually see this with car collisions at great speed.

She must have hit something

pretty hard, and pretty fast

to break that pelvis.

In a bone-breaking smash like this,

the biggest fear is the soft internal organs crashing against the skeleton and tearing open.

The liver, the spleen, the kidneys - could have ruptured.

You can rip your aorta and just bleed to death. It's sheer luck that this didn't happen to Gilly.

Gilly seems blessed with a bizarre kind of good luck.

It was remarkable - she had no internal injuries. Absolutely nothing.

As the light faded, her friend went for help.

The sunset Gilly so wanted to watch was now a terrifying prospect.

The cold dark night bit into her broken bones.

It was getting much sort of colder and I was just starting to shiver a hell of a lot.

It was really, really eerily quiet.

All I could hear was the rustling of the wind.

Gilly didn't know whether help would ever come.

Her luck, it seems, was running out.

Five search teams had been hunting all night but it wasn't until nearly dawn that Gilly was spotted.

And the next thing I knew I was in the hospital.

I was going through double doors, with hundreds of doctors around me.

Gilly's smashed pelvis was not the only broken bone.

During the fall she had also broken her neck.

The neck is comprised of seven bones,

stacked on top of one another,

with the spinal cord running right through the middle.

When subjected to severe force, one thing that can happen is called jump for set,

when one of the bones jumps out of place.

The spinal cord goes with that,

you could wind up with a severed spinal cord and be completely paralysed.

Before the operation, the surgeon wasn't sure if Gilly's luck had finally run out.

During hours of complex surgery, it was touch and go whether she would be paralysed from the chest down.

In Gilly's case the bones had jumped out and yet the spinal cord appeared to be unaffected.

When I woke up from the operation the first thing I did was open my eyes,

and I was like, "I made it! I made it!"

Gilly escaped paralysis in another lucky break.

Falling off a mountain is a very unlucky thing.

Spending a night up on the mountain after falling from a great height is a very unlucky thing.

But, in Gilly's case, the more we looked and the harder we looked,

the more amazed we were at how lucky this woman really was.

In some bizarre way, Gilly's glad she nearly died out there.

Without the experience, she wouldn't be successful

as an international canoeist and University Sports Scientist.

There are things about the accident that I think are definitely bad,

but there is so much good that has come out of it.

I am a lot more determined than what I was and I want to do things.

I want to see the world and there's too many things I've got to do.

Time now to enter the Bizarre E.R. confessional.

We've invited medics from across the land to share the funniest

and freakiest things they've seen in A&E.

These stories might sound far-fetched but they're all 100% true.

Never underestimate the authority you have as a doctor.

I was seeing an old chap who'd come up to A&E breathless.

He'd been off for tests and I went out to bring him into the cubicle

to tell him the results.

He was sat next to an elderly woman, so I just assumed.

I said, "Come in, Mr Thompson. Would you come in as well?"

I told him all his details and turned to her and said,

"Have you any questions you'd like to ask, Mrs Thompson."

She said, "I'm not Mrs Thompson."

I said, "Sorry, what relationship are you to Mr Thompson?" "I've never met him before in my life."

I said, "What in God's name are you doing in here, listening to intimate details of this man's condition?"

She said, "Oh, with you running late, I thought you were seeing us two at a time."

I was on duty one day and I saw a gentleman,

for some bizarre reason decided to insert a pint glass into his rectum.

As you can see from this X-ray this is really a situation of a beer

reaching the parts that others really never reach.

It's back to Bradford Royal Infirmary for our final case.

Where we're not witnessing the launch of a bizarre new beauty spa.

This is Darren Presswell.

He's been rushed into A&E with an eye-watering injury and he's at risk of losing his sight.

I'm really sorry, darling, it is the most uncomfortable procedure to do.

Darren was transporting a truck load of dry cement to a local factory.

Suddenly in the middle of a delivery a high-pressure hose from his lorry to a silo broke.

Without warning cement dust exploded straight into his face.

Aargh!

And the toxic power shower of chemicals immediately started burning into his eyes.

If you can - I know it's hard, but if you can try and open your eye a bit.

Despite the blinding pain, brave Darren sits back and calmly endures his tear-jerking treatment.

Head this way.

Although it looks like water torture, this jet wash is the only way medics can save Darren's sight.

It's important to irrigate the eyes

with normal saline which your body's made up of,

so that's the first step.

We need to get the concrete out of his eyes because it burns quickly.

It can be very serious, cos that's long-term damage.

-What's happened to you, fella?

-You what?

-This is our consultant - Mr Wilson.

-Can you see me all right?

If you say he's handsome, forget it, you're not seeing right well.

Oh! Look how beautiful I am! Ha-ha!

We need to make a formal assessment of your vision.

The priority is to get these rinsed out as best we can, all right?

That's cold.

Cement's made from limestone, which is an alkali.

It's more dangerous than acid as it continues to bore into the skin long after the initial contact.

You feel it burning straightaway, as soon as it hits you in the face.

It just feels like you've got a lot of grit in your eye.

Just going to check his pH, and all we do is stick this in his eye. Shut your eye.

It should be roundabout here and it's roundabout there at the moment.

Eventually the sluicing seems to be working.

I can see light. That's a good thing.

It is, it is. And I can see your eyeball compared to last time!

Anne's hoping that the 9 litres of saline she's sloshed around Darren's

scorched eyeballs will have flushed out almost all of the noxious dust.

-Can you read to the red line?

-D...E...

So Dr Brad can now come back to assess any impact on Darren's vision.

I can't see the rest of it.

..and take a closer look at the cornea.

Just look forward for me if that's all right.

You've got quite a lot of damage on top of that where it's burned the cornea which is the top of the eye.

Yeah, on this one, too.

A more thorough peer into Darren's peepers is needed.

This time by eye specialist Dr Hardisty,

who's probably the first person today to give Darren some good news.

His pH is about 7, so that's pretty good - excellent.

Things are looking up but Dr Hardisty still needs to inspect Darren's cornea.

Straight ahead again.

The cornea is the dome-shaped surface that covers the front of the eye and it needs to be smooth and

as clear as glass for good vision.

If the caustic dust cloud's done major damage,

Darren could be looking at serious and long-term problems with his sight.

Looks like a relatively mild to moderate severity alkaline injury.

We'll give you some drops which make the pupils larger and relax the eye.

We'll also start you on antibiotic drops to prevent any infection.

My expectation is by tomorrow, he'll be feeling more comfortable,

but certainly for the next 24/48 hours

he'll have significant discomfort.

It's important to manage that for him.

Thanks to the swift action of the Bradford staff, doctors are hopeful

that within a week most of the burns to the cornea will heal.

He may need corrective glasses in future but considering how severe his injury was,

Darren's been very lucky. The medics have saved his sight.

Next time on Bizarre E.R. -

Love truly hurts for one single lady.

Love is the most dangerous game to play.

A disjointed defender has a foot that is seriously offside.

I told the ambulance - just pop it back in and I'll carry on.

And the curious tale of how an artist survived being skewered by a two-metre metal rod

when she impaled herself on her own sculpture.

I tried to work out why my arm was stuck in the air.

When I went to introduce myself to her, I said, "Hi, I'm Jules. I'm a... Whoa!"

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