We imagine that treating hospital patients can get pretty boring. The same old symptoms, day after day -- heart palpitations, shortness of breath, bloody stools -- how passe. So on the occasion that someone checks in with a truly unique situation, like if an eel climbed up someone's ass or something, you can imagine that hospital staff would get a little excited about the break in routine. Such was the case in 2013, when a man checked into a New Zealand hospital complaining that, yeah, an eel had in fact climbed up his ass.
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"IS IT REALLY IMPORTANT HOW IT GOT UP THERE?!"
Now, it hasn't been revealed how exactly this set of circumstances came about, but it has been revealed that the wayward fish, who very much took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, was about the size of a sprig of asparagus. Upon learning about his situation, a bunch of hospital employees broke regulations to snoop on the victim's X-rays and medical records. And by that we mean as many as 82 employees.
Unfortunately, there's always one asshole who will take things too far, and somebody leaked the X-rays to the media. Surprisingly, the outlet declined to publish the story, instead notifying the hospital that their staff thought their patients' confidentiality rights were trumped by their noble desire to bring hilarity to the public. At least one employee was dismissed, dozens of others subjected to disciplinary action, and even more investigated, including nurses, midwives, junior doctors, and senior officials. We don't have any information about the status of the eel in question, but we hope Pixar does a Finding Nemo-style feature about the incident, told from the eel's point of view.
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Nigel the pelican still makes an appearance.
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