5 Real-Life Medical Nightmares Straight Out Of Horror Movies
Curses are things of popular fiction. Some, like that Romani Thinner spell, would actually be America's greatest healthcare triumph since the invention of anti-masturbation cornflakes. Others, like your sports team's neverending slump and failure to retain draft picks, seem very much real. Maybe you're being punished for accidentally hitting that owl with your car 15 years ago, though you still feel terrible about it today.
But none of the above are as horrific as the medical curses suffered by the poor, innocent, unwitting people detailed below. Are these terrible nightmare conditions the result of demoniacal invocations, blind happenstance, or the maledictive influence of otherworldly cephalopod deities (reptilian space beings are so last decade; the 2020s are about interdimensional squid-people, baby)? Read on to find out…
Man Passes Sperm And Urine Through His Rectum, Gas And Fecal Matter Through His Urethra
Humans are an assortment of senses and functions cumulatively collected over billions of years. Occasionally, they get crossed; some people smell sounds, hear colors, and prematurely ejaculate at the taste of mint. Yet in a case doctors labeled as "curious," a man spent two years passing sperm and urine through his rectum, and gas and fecal matter through his urethra. Dickbutt, eat your ass out!
The man sought medical aid after a five-day-long testicle ache and complained that he'd "been passing a 'substantial' amount of urine and sperm from his rectum over the previous two years." Seems like a long time to leave that one on the back burner, but oh well. He'd also been suffering from "pneumaturia" and "fecaluria," words you'll hopefully never hear. Because they mean passing gas and feces through the urine, respectively. Though there's nothing respectful about your body peeing poo.
CT scans pinpointed a gas-filled structure connected to his rectum. Jokes aside, this unintended connection between two body parts is known as a fistula, not to be confused with porn starlet Fistula Dubois-Toussaint Roquefort. Such fistulas may be caused by massive penetrative rectal trauma (riding a bike without a seat) or abdominal surgery performed by a strange doctor on an isolated island teeming with hyena-pig hybrids and talking apes.
But the pee-pooping man had not suffered any injuries or visited any mysteriously remote Pacific islands. The problem, putting it mildly, originated two years previous when he spent three weeks in a coma due to drug intoxication. He had a Foley catheter inserted, but caregiver negligence caused an injury that inadvertently connected his nether tubes.
Fortunately, given the breadth of medical science, doctors were able to fix him right as rain through a simple Ass-Dick Reversion procedure.
People's Teeth Are Popping Out Of Their Noses And Gums
Ectopic means out of place, and it's one of the worst things to hear at your doctor’s, not involving the words "insurance" and "covered" and “not.”
Ectopic, depending on the next term, can mean that your 15-pound "chonker" of a baby is careening down the wrong exit, as I imagine it. Or you'll be peeing left for the rest of your life. An ectopic brain or heart forewarns a long, successful career of political duty. Ectopic can also signify that one's teeth are wreaking a hell path through their gums or nose:
My birth country has great dental expertise and an innate love of brined onions, served hot! But if we're talking about a Dracula born in the Soviet Baltic dankness or in one of the Carolinas where fluoride in tap water is banned due to a mistranslated bible verse that reads, "Ye shall reap the goodly joys of my worldly house, thou shalt not sample of the malefic, luciferous fluoride, ye who are desirous of marching through the Divine Gates of Heaven," then that Dracula may look like this.
Ectopic teeth are the most common ectopic anything, other than the ectopic brand loyalty people show to the corporations selling them sawdust and cricket sheddings in the shape of Oreos. Of those ectopic teeth, which occur in about 0.1 percent of people, the canines are likeliest to erupt out of position. This may be due to predisposed factors, such as a lack of room on the jawbone.
And if you thought wisdom teeth could be exasperating, imagine a stubbornly out-of-place E-tooth smashing upward through the jaw, like a rampaging Kool-Aid man triggering mass amniocentesis through a third-world maternity ward. Hopefully, these issues are detected and resolved at an earlier age. But that doesn't always happen, as in the case of a 38-year-old man "with a long history of difficulty in breathing through his right nostril." The cause of that difficulty? Boom, tooth in the nose!
Not all cases are this gruesome or detrimental. Some ectopic teeth may cause no problems, and many people ignore them, as with many other medical or hygienic issues. As always, it's the luck of the draw.
“The Itch.” The Woman Who Scratched A Hole To Her Brain
Itches are undesirable, but scratching is one of life's priceless joys, equal to dropping a good deuce or discovering true love. Ask yourself this: would you rather have lived a life never itched and, therefore, never scratched? But scratching can turn disastrous, as it did for a woman anonymously labeled M. who lived a reverse American dream: she married, produced two progeny, started doing drugs, lost her family, and contracted HIV. Then she turned her life around, conquered drugs, and got that pesky HIV to quiescent levels. Finally, shingles came and left, leaving a portion of her scalp numb but irrevocably itchy.
Medical treatments failed also, as did head dressings. At night, she scratched in her sleep, waking to bloody pillows. Until one day, she didn't wake up to a bloody pillow but a strange brownish-greenish goo.
It turns out she scratched into her brain, which isn't a particularly good thing for brains to have done to them. The shingles "caused a loss of periphery sensory neurons," which relay the sensations of a late-night toe stub or of accidentally leaning against a hot stove while being nonchalant around your new sweetie on a dinner date.
"Now, wait a minute, Ivan, aren't skulls made of tough bone that resists such injury? I was told I suffered a pretty serious mountainside tumble as a toddler and am perfectly fine now." In return, twitching person, I ask you this: don't people in gulf states and countries compete for mates through headbutting displays that leave them no more brain-damaged than before? True, true, bones are strong. But M.'s braincase was softened by bone infection and osteomyelitis, leaving it as soft as the delicious turtle eggs that refill one’s peptide reserves after a good butting display.
If there's one silver lining, other than making this Halloween article possible, it's that this extreme example exemplifying the effects of shingles could hopefully inspire more individuals to vaccinate against this condition's complications, which include stroke, blindness, and "lifelong chronic pain and itch."
Alpha Kabeja Woke Up From a Coma With Fake Memories
Memory is a tricky thing. Is it an ever-accumulating agglomeration of our doings and feelings, locked in some immaterial ether beyond our ken? Or is it the manifestation of electricity and chemicals in a scrotum-wrinkled hunk of jellified meat? Considering a few shots of gin can affect it so profoundly, I say it's the latter. That doesn't make it any less esoteric, I argue, as per the case of Alpha Kabeja, who awakened from a coma with the opposite of amnesia: a false life worthy of a young, pre-chlamydic James Bond.
It began on New Year's day, 2012, following a hard-partying New Year's Night. Kabeja rushed off, bicycle-wise, to see his girlfriend but forgot his helmet; it was the only time he forewent it. Then he got hit by a van. The impact violently whiplashed his brain midline across its midline, then the driver booked, or, in Brit lingo, "They done a runner."
The accident details are lost forever since there was no CCTV or witnesses. When Kabeja awoke three weeks later, doctors feared amnesia, but Kabeja said, "Nah, I got hella memories." Only they weren't his. Or anybody’s. He believed he arrived at the hospital in his private jet, a Gulfstream G650 he was sure was parked in the hospital quad. He also thought his girlfriend was pregnant with twins—he could see the ultrasound clearly in his mind. The twins were to be named Sky and Nikita. He also believed (or rather, knew) that he'd just concluded a successful job interview with MI6, presumably for a vacant international double agent position.
His friends initially indulged him for the same reason you don't disturb a masturbating sleepwalker. But his illusions soon crashed. There was no jet in the quad. M16 was closed on New Year's day during the supposed interview. Deflatingly, his girlfriend was not pregnant. Kabeja's brain had filled in the coma gap, not with TV static or the badger song, but fabricated memories based on somewhat real happenings: Kabeja's friends were getting pregnant. Geminicity does run in his family. He actually did apply to MI6 one time. And "his" jet was one he'd seen in a movie.
Sure, we all know boasters, including the 2nd-year Poly Sci hopeful who purportedly received a corner office in a midtown highrise. No, they can't recall the name of the law firm, the address, or what the building's called… it's kind of grayish and has lots of windows. But Kabeja wasn't trying to deceive, he really recalled these things. And not through the murky remembrances of crime show victims or our own post-nightclub recollections. Kabeja's confabulations were etched crystal clear in his neural network.
He took the situation in better stride than I handle Trader Joe's being out of the seasonal kringle (that pumpkin caramel, whew, goddamn). He has become Alpha Kabeja 2.0, a contented, reborn entity who cannot stop smiling, forgives his hit-and-runner, and blossoms with unprecedented creativity. Alrighty, I'm off to bike around the industrial sector at night in a Johnny Cash cosplay.
"William" Gets Permanently Groundhog Day'ed After A Root Canal
Groundhog Day or whatever came before it catalyzed endless spin-offs. Including the man that repeats Thanksgiving until preventing the punch-out with his in-laws during the annual Henderson touch-football game with grandma. Or the quirky teen who realizes Christmas is actually, indeed, all about consumerism—there's nothing holy about elf labor and Cola-guzzling polar bears. Or even the lady that ends her eternal Valentine's Day after taking a turd in the neighbor's decayed Jack-O-Lantern.
But would you believe there's a medical basis for Groundhog Day-e-osis? That medical basis is a Brit named "William," and he's been reliving the same day since his perpetual dental appointment on March 14th, 2005. The worst that happens to most people after dental anesthesia is waking with empty pockets or mysterious bruises, but not for William, aka WO, who was left unable to form new memories following “the first night's sleep” after his root canal.
Uhhh, why? Apparently, it's a huge enigma, and some say the anesthesia or procedure had nothing to do with it. Perhaps it’s some kind of quantum mechanical quirk. Regardless, poor William wakes every morning thinking it's 2005, the momentous year during which some stuff happened in Liberia. So every day, he rejoins the conscious world as a military man in Germany with a dental appointment.
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He can't hold onto memories for longer than 90 minutes, then forgets everything tomorrow—time and memory have become a confluent nonexistence. Now, William relies on digital notes to remember everything. Perplexed scientists surmise William's case may result from faulty protein synthesis in the brain. The process that physically rebuilds brain pathways to consolidate fresh memories because memories are snail trails of electricity and feel-good chemicals. Coincidentally, this process takes 90 minutes.
His potential diagnosis, anterograde amnesia, typically occurs after brain surgery, injury, or stumbling onto your grandparents' pharmaceutical-enhanced rekindling. But William showed no sign of brain bleeding or grandparent-induced boning trauma. When asked, he simply shrugged, to the dejection of still-confused medical researchers with blank pads.
The only new fact he remembers (but not the details surrounding it) is his father's death. Somehow, that freight train of grief-loss steamrolled through his immemorable barriers like the Juggernaut. Mixing metaphors aside, he recites that he has a memory issue and that he thinks it's 2005, but it's not— though, does he really believe these things? Free baked potato to the first person that figures it out.
He knows all sorts of basic life stuff and his family members, but as of 2005. So he fails to recall his children's aging and every day relearns that he’s missed their maturing. And that his pet is dead. Wow, damn, that's way more depressing than any witch's curse, including acid diarrhea. Happy Halloween, I guess.
Thumbnail: drshohmelian/Pixabay, Mitrey/Pixabay
