Surgeon's stories

    Many years ago I, in conjunction with my family, started to grade sneezes on a scale of one to ten according to the noise generated. This quickly developed into a competition to see who could sneeze the loudest. A rating of five or six would be what most people would consider normal with lower numbers reserved for the more discreet. On the other hand, between eight and ten would be considered sufficiently loud to make other people’s ears bleed or to knock over small children.   The sneeze in this story, however, was unusual not because of its volume, but because of the product - I am not talking about snot or blood here, or even a bead previously inserted into a nostril by a small child and subsequently sneezed out. A lady came to one of our rural clinics asking for some worm medicine – we routinely prescribed this to young children as hookworm infestation is common in Cambodia as a result of them walking barefoot on contaminated soil. The larvae penetrate the s...

      The purpose of this blog is to provide some intriguing and, at times, amusing medical cases that I have encountered over many years of clinical practice in Cambodia, the UK and on the Isle of Man. I hope that they will be of interest to both medical and non-medical readers and I have pitched them primarily at a non-medical audience. Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions as I am new to the blogging community! Just to reassure you that any photographs I use have been taken with the consent of the persons depicted and do not allow their identification. Continuing from last week’s theme of weapons, my story this week concerns a slightly more conventional one, albeit rather more old-fashioned, in the form of an arrow. As before, the circumstances surrounding the injury were unusual and took the form of an accident rather than a deliberate attack. In Cambodia it is not uncommon to find home-made arrows being used for hunting rats, frequently fired from some s...

 I don't know whether you have watched Jackie Chan in the film "The Legend of Drunken Master"  but there is an entertaining scene involving a fight over food using chopsticks.  I worked until recently as a surgeon in a small hospital in Northwestern Cambodia. A number of years ago I dealt with a case in which a chopstick had been used as a weapon during a family dispute resulting in the patient being stabbed in the back with a metal one. The initial story given was that he had fallen over and landed on the chopstick, but as is so often the case, this did not hold up under closer scrutiny as a chopstick does not normally balance on it's end! The family initially wanted to fly back home to South Korea for treatment, but this was not an option and eventually they agreed to him staying at our hospital. The patient himself had a punctured lung and, ironically, needed a larger metal object to be inserted into his chest (trocar for a chest drainage tube) in order to treat th...