ER: The Ice Pick Man Cometh

You can have what's behind Curtain #1 or Curtain #2. Which would you like: The man impaled through the ear with an ice pick or the chatty gal who has swallowed her boyfriend's cell phone?

Both are the wacky situations portrayed on last week's episode of ER -- "Tell Me No Secrets."

The ER doctors are amazed that Ice Pick man has managed to impale himself in the left ear without hitting any major arteries.

However, the situation that really made me lift an eyebrow was that the ER doctors decided to attempt to remove the ice pick themselves...right there behind the curtain. To make things even more wacky, Hope, the intern, volunteers to retract the ice pick, under Dr. Morris's supervision. When she tugs, the handle breaks off, leaving just the end of the metal spike sticking out. Granted, they did attempt to pull in consults from neurosurgery and ENT, among other departments, and were put off. But, come on...would any ER doctor have taken that chance?

WebMD's Dr. Louise Chang probably wouldn't have. "I'd be worried that the ice pick would've penetrated the brain, in which case removal should've been done by neurosurgery."

And, Dr. Michael Smith adds:

"So what was the ice pick sticking into? That's the real question. It must have pierced something if it's sticking straight out of the ear. But it could be anything from the eardrum to the brain. My guess is somewhere in between. If it has gotten to the brain, that would mean it went through the skull and that's certainly not something you'd tackle in the ER (that's an immediate trip to the operating room to be performed by a neurosurgeon). If it's just the ear drum then, sure, you could pull it out in the ER. Regardless, the doc would need a good scan to evaluate where the ice pick is and exactly what they needed to do about it."

Now, draw back Curtain #2. There you find a babbling young woman who has swallowed her boyfriend's cell phone. She says he was getting calls from his ex-girlfriend so she took his phone and tried to keep it away from him. She didn't want him to get it back, so she just opened wide and down it went.

WHAT?

First I went into a fit of laughter, and then I pulled out my own cell phone. I held it in the palm of my hand. It's pretty small...maybe two inches wide and 3-1/2 to 4 inches long. Since I have a hard time swallowing a large vitamin, I just can't imagine I could toss back a cell phone, even the smallest one. And, if I did, wouldn't it get stuck in my esophagus? How real is this? Can it happen?

ER's fictional phone-swallower was not only breathing easy, but talking non-stop. And, the phone even begins to ring from inside her stomach.

Dr. Chang comments:

"I would've expected some problems with it getting stuck in the esophagus, which would require removal. If a foreign object makes it to the stomach, it can usually pass out through the stool. However, a cell phone is kind of large, so if it did make it to the stomach it would still probably cause a problem farther down the GI tract, possibly causing an intestinal obstruction or perforation which would warrant surgical removal."

Actually, this HAS happened before, but not exactly like it did on ER. In the real case, the woman was forced by her boyfriend to swallow the cell phone and it DID get lodged in her esophagus.

I guess those silly "Do Not Swallow" warnings that come on cell phone packages aren't so ridiculous after all.

Related Topics: Do Cell Phones "Excite" Your Brain?

Technorati Tags: ER, Ice Pick, Cell Phone, Swallowing Cell Phones