Oh, but those are the more existentially troubling stories. We have not yet ventured into the straight-up disgusting. "One of the most challenging conditions to care for," Ben said, "is an infection called Clostridium difficile. Its main effect is to cause severe diarrhea. The stool is so watery that it becomes a nearly-constant leakage, yet it's so mucousy that it's quite sticky and difficult to clean. Plus, it has a distinctive, extremely foul odor that tends to linger in the nostrils for hours or days afterward."

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At least you can take brain-shoes off.

"On top of that, it's incredibly infectious. Sometimes we have to place a tube into the patient's rectum to drain the stool away into a collection bag. It's uncomfortable, embarrassing, and doesn't make a perfect seal, but it at least gives us some chance to keep the patients from getting covered in their own stool. If you are ever a visitor in a hospital and your family member has one of those tubes in place, please make sure not to trip over it. The resulting mess will ruin a nurse's whole day." And the janitor might actually end up killing himself.

Then again, it might end up washing away some of that sticky, troublesome brain.

According to a 2007 study, 24 percent of intensive care nurses show signs of PTSD, as compared to 14 percent of general nurses. General nurses deal with far more death and disease than anybody should have to, but at least those are usually from natural causes. It was seeing what people do to each other that got to Paul: "When a 17-year-old kid rolls into the trauma bay with multiple gunshot wounds or stab wounds and dies, it's easy to forget that you watched someone get murdered because it happened in a hospital. The disconnect between the shooting and the death didn't really register for me until I got home and realized that I couldn't save a kid from getting murdered. Eventually it all piled up, and the emotional toll began to exact a physical response."

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And you can't even become a vigilante, because they keep giving you the night shift.

Witnessing the death of a child is the leading cause of PTSD in ER nurses, but in most cases, they're told to suck it up, wash off all that pesky child blood, and get back to work. It's a job where you're expected to be immune to human tragedy, where adverse reactions are seen as a weakness and not an inevitability.

"There are virtually no safety nets in place for us," Paul said.

That's highly unusual, and not generally seen unless the patient passed a kidney stone the size of an actual kidney. This was not the case. "After gentle questioning, she finally admitted that she and her husband shared this esoteric fantasy of urethral intercourse." Without getting too technical, a woman's urethra is very clearly intended to be an exit-only orifice, and horrible things can happen if you void the warranty on that equipment.

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The urethra is supposed to be 2 inches long and 0.25 inches in diameter.

"They started out with very small toys, and gradually moved to bigger and bigger ones, and after some years, they finally stretched her urethra enough for the guy's penis to fit. They were both overjoyed that they could have sex in a new and different way. But they couldn't have sex that way very often, because every time they did, she wound up with a bladder infection and had to go to the ED."

You'd think that multiple trips to the ER would encourage this couple to simply try some butt stuff, like normal people do when they tire of the more utilitarian orifices, but they wouldn't stop. So they were referred to "a very understanding urologist, who would treat the infections when necessary without requiring more trips to the emergency room. The couple went away happy, and as far as I know, they haven't had to return to the ER since." Finally, they could live out their lives in piss.

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There was some crying later, but that was because they tried tear duct sex.

But not all of Ben's patients get uh ... happy endings. "In my area, there's a fad for injecting erectile dysfunction drugs directly into the flesh of the penis. This is quite a bad idea. If the erection doesn't go down after a few hours, a physician will take two 18-gauge needles and stick them lengthwise into the penis, through the glans, to let the blood out. Sometimes it sprays pretty far."

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This is an 18-gague needle, although the doctor might swear that it's a 20 on a good day.