What, What, in the What?

What doesn’t kill you only makes you look … er … um … right.

Never mind. Andres Jauregui explains:

A man in China’s southeastern Guangdong province admitted himself to a local hospital after he reportedly got a live eel stuck inside him. According to British tabloid The Sun, the man inserted the 20-inch-long Asian swamp eel into his anus after seeing it done in a porn movie, and he had to endure all-night surgery to have it extracted.

According to a HuffPost translation of a blogger’s post on Chinese message board forum Mop.com, the eel reportedly chewed through the man’s colon, perforating his large intestine, and became stuck in his body cavity. A graphic X-ray image (seen below) shows how far inside the eel was when the man came in for treatment.

Medical team members reportedly said the eel, which was “simply trying to find its way out,” was alive when removed but died shortly thereafter. According to The Sun, the man is still recovering at the hospital and might face animal cruelty charges.

One might be inclined to inquire as to under what circumstances anal insertion of an eel seems like a good idea. Is there no moment in which one simply shrugs and says, “Yes, but it’s an eel!”

I mean ….

Excuse me, but is that an explosive in your head?

‘Tis a grim reality that warfare should have a “cool” factor. And, of course, it can’t be pleasant to be the soldier in such a condition, but still … this is so damn cool:

The patient arrived in critical condition last month at the Bagram Air Base hospital in Afghanistan, with what American military doctors at first thought was an all too typical war injury: metal shrapnel from an improvised bomb lodged in his head.

A CAT scan showed that the piece of metal, about two and a half inches long, was probably a cartridge fragment — again, not at all unusual.

But as the patient, an Afghan soldier in his 20s, was prepared for surgery, the chief radiologist, Lt. Col. Anthony Terreri, took a closer look at the CAT scan. Stunned, he realized the object was an explosive round, primed to go off.

“It looks like we have a problem here,” he announced.

To the other, how would you like to be Major Jeffrey Rengel, USAF, the anesthesiologist who, after the evacuation of the operating room, was left to tend to the patient until the bomb squad arrived?

The surgical team recounted the episode for Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times.

Don’t bother reading this

Rare kudos to FOX News.

A German retiree is taking a hospital to court after she went in for a leg operation and got a new anus instead ….

The rest of that sentence, in fact, is, “the Daily Telegraph is reporting”. The FOX version is nothing more than a slightly edited—for vernacular—version of the Australian newspaper’s short article. But the thing is that I picked this up from David Schmader at Slog, who noted that The Sun had the better headline. Indeed, the British tabloid’s staff reporter simply edited the four sentences of the Australian version.

So let’s do a headline comparison:

• Daily Telegraph: “Pensioner gets bum’s rush on op”
• The Sun: “Leg op woman gets bum deal”
• FOXnews.com: “Woman Goes for Leg Operation, Gets New Anus Instead”

And, yeah. I have to go with the FOX headline. I mean, you don’t need to make any joke about it. The simple fact of the story is the joke. Well, sort of. As long as you’re not the pensioner who still needs the leg operation.

Well, that and even without the typographical omission, there’s something about the phrase, “Click hear Dr. Manny talk about medical errors” that strikes me just so. They ought to just give it up and go find themselves a doctor named Nick.