Originally published at: Man suffering from headaches surprised when doctors find chopsticks in his skull | Boing Boing
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‘You’re never the same once the air hits your brain.’
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He was damn lucky it was something wooden. Oooffff.
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When someone asks me if they can pick my brain for a minute, I never think they might mean literally. 0_o
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Always tip your server!
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I guess that pituitary gland wasn’t doing very much anyway.
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That sounds…familiar.
According to doctors from the Department of Nutrition at Vietnam-Cuba Friendship Hospital in Dong Hoi, the sugary soft drinks help replenish the body’s energy quickly in times of need and support the functioning of the body’s digestive system.
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Gives me a headache too
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Apparently the pituitary is more robust than you would think. I was having optical migraines a few years ago and my doctor was being very thorough to make sure there wasn’t anything more serious going on, so she ordered a CT Scan. The spot where your pituitary is supposed to be appeared empty on mine. Then she ordered an MRI and a bunch of blood tests. It turned out my pituitary was there and working fine. It had just gotten squished at some point in my life. It’s called Empty Sella Syndrome, and often has no symptoms and is only discovered if you get a head CT Scan for some other reason. It was not the cause of my optical migraines, which I still get occasionally.
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At least this one is a lot more believable.
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Ye gods! Why not x-ray first?
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Plain film (Xray), CT (spiral 3d xrays) and MRI (magnets, how do they work!), all have their strenghts and weaknesses, depending on what the ordering MD is looking for. Speed, complexity, cost, availability, sensitivity, specificity all come into play when deciding which modality to use.
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Flashbacks of Ray Liotta in Hannibal 
When he was younger and before he became a social worker, Dad tells me he worked as a radiographer.
One of the more icky stories I remember him telling us is of getting a patient in from the Forest of Dean complaining of headaches. Turns out, he’d had a form of trepanning performed on him as a younger man, and had two nails driven into his head. The nails had apparently gotten rusty, so the doctors took them out and replaced them with some stainless steel ones.
I’ve grown to be a little dubious of this story as I’ve gotten older, as I suspect he may have embellished it in order to freak out my friends and I.
But then, people from the Forest are a bit… odd.
He also told another, faaaar more icky story about a motorcyclist coming in after an accident.
Warning! Only unspoil if prepared for mortifying levels of ick!
Apparently, the guy came in conscious with his crash helmet still on, but when they removed the helmet, his head split apart; it was only held together by the crash helmet.
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I get that.
MRI scanning when it cannot be confirmed that an alien object contains no ferrous metal strikes me as very high risk.
The post says MRI scan. Perhaps it was in fact a CT scan.
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Yeah, in every first aid class I took since 1984 there was a guy who told that story. And it never was the instructor. The last time I heard it was… yesterday on my biannual refresher.
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The image posted by gatto is a CT 3d reconstruction.
If you have to emergently MRI someone and you aren’t sure, you can take a quick plain XR to look for metal, or use the CT scanner to do a body length, low quality single pass to look for metal. Usually in the ED if we need an emergent MRI, the patient has already been CT’d and we have a good idea of any metal present.
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No sign of the sniffles or CSF drips. Thanks, Immune System!
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