Japanese Prison Camps and the ER

It has come to my attention that emergency room workers are not at all faced with the same problems depicted on “ER.” Chris’ sister, Julie, was an emergency room nurse in Indianapolis for several years. The hospital was in the city and one would presume that she would be treating a plethora of gunshot wounds, stab wounds and drug overdoses more than anything else. Not necessarily. Julie reports that overwhelmingly the lion’s share of cases she saw involved a variety of foreign objects jammed up where, as it were, the sun don’t shine. There has been everything from light bulbs to wrist watches, Coke bottles to small furry animals that have made their homes in someone’s hiney. Anything even vaguely phallic has been tried. Julie says the worst part is keeping a straight face during the fantastic stories that patients will concoct to explain how this occurred. The part that mystifies me is this: these folks with the anal retentive fetish could easily go into a sex toy store and purchase an item designed for this purpose and which presumably would be much easier to extract when the festivities were concluded than, say, a light bulb would be. (Lord! Can you imagine what someone would face if it broke?!) But they apparently feel that shopping at Dr. John’s Love Land is somehow MORE humiliating than explaining to emergency room personnel that one has a flashlight lodged in one’s rectum.

All of this is terribly funny to me while it is tragic. I know I should not judge people if I have not walked a mile in their mocassins, but I guess I never will. I hereby declare henceforth and for all time that my bottom is off limits to all flashlights, baseball bats, light bulbs or frozen sausages. One er nurse herself destroyed her sphincter by continually inserting frozen sausages. So much so that she would be on duty in the er and suddenly soil herself because she no longer had control.

One patient arrived at Julie’s hospital DOA. He was wearing a red lace teddy and high heels and had a vibrator protruding from his arse. He was a retired army colonel who had had a heart attack during “war games.” His wife didn’t seem to mind the embarrassing condition in which he had been found. She was largely concerned with having the corpse removed from the hallway. I guess she was expecting company.

While we’re on the topic, Chris disclosed another tragic story of a woman who delivered a healthy baby at the hospital, and a butt. There was a second undeveloped fetus accompanying the healthy one and all that developed of the other one was a butt. I am not able to describe or imagine what a butt looks like scooting down the birth canal all by itself, but that’s how the story goes. The parents of the baby and the butt were not upset by the tragedy. The baby was healthy and I guess they were never told of a second fetus, so it wasn’t a really big deal to them. But it is somehow disturbingly reminiscent of a 1950s B movie, or the cover of a grocery store newspaper.

Julie has experienced many horrible things during her er tenure. Abscesses the size of marshmallows that stink enough to make one sick—that sort of thing. There are many more stories, but they are disgusting.

My friend, Chris, has interesting interests. Most men in his demographic bracket are interested in sports, cars, music, that kind of thing. Chris is interested in Japanese prison camps. He talks about them all the time and shares with me anecdotal information about life inside one.

During World War II there were a number of American and European service women who were detained in Japanese prison camps. When their monthly cycles were on, these women were each given a rag about 10 or 12 inches square. They were told to embroider their initials in the rag so that each woman would get her own back after laundering. Laundering consisted of sending some poor helper around the camp with a bucket of luke warm water. The soiled rags were thrown into the water and swished around a bit, wrung out and returned to their owners. Of course each woman only had to endure this level of filth for 24 months or so. After 2 years the effects of the malnutrition and horribly unsanitary living conditions would set in and the women stopped menstruating all together anyway. Makes me feel grateful whenever I drive past a Walgreens.

I spoke to Chris recently and asked for elaboration about the report about his sister’s emergency room chore of having to remove assorted phallic devices from people’s poop shoots. He emphasized that, invariably, the patient claims the incident occurred when he/she accidentally sat on the offending object. This is how one young lady explained being violated by a Ball Park frank which then broke off inside her. She was unable to remove it unaided. I remarked to Chris that this is completely plausible; I often sit on my dinner plate in the nude and later find a bratwurst lodged somewhere I didn’t intend. It’s a constant worry. He agreed, citing the proliferation of items that are always “plunging” up his butt.

Why, it’s a wonder any of us can ever stroll through a hardware store in peace without some rogue hand tool assaulting us, or through any ordinary grocery store without having to fight off rogue zucchinis and cucumbers that would attack us from every side.