Since my days as a fresh-faced medical student poking dead people’s stiff bits and discovering the wonders of laughing gas straight from a mask, I have learned two things. One, people are perverts set on finding new and inventive ways of fucking themselves up, usually in the misguided pursuit of pleasure. Two, there is very little as a doctor I can do to stop them.
Maybe I’m prudish, but there are very few inanimate objects I look at and think, “Oh, gosh, how I would like to put that up my chimney.” Penises, tongues, fingers, vibrators. Full. Stop. I learned this lesson at a young age. When I was about twelve another girl at school had an ugly and permanently disfiguring accident involving an electric toothbrush and a glass test-tube from the science lab. Any desire for experimental wanking with unusual objects was sharply cut short.

But one particular middle-aged housewife had obviously not benefited from such early erudition. Whether in the spirit of exploration or eroticism, there is just no excuse for getting a slug stuck. Now I can see the similarity between a slug and a tongue. Both are fundamentally a moist, wriggling, muscley mass, but there has to be another option no matter how long the dry patch has been.

I know this sounds like a lot of uran myths, but honestly she relayed her story to my colleague like this: She happened to be pruning her peonies in her silky nightdress around midnight when to her utmost horror she noticed one slug making its way up her inner thigh. The slippery bugger was just too nippy for her and before she knew what was happening it had resolutely lodged itself in her front bottom.

It’s not surprising really. Warm, moist, and away from predators – a perfect sanctuary for a slug. Or so it thought. After finally going to A&E about three in the morning they admited her with stifled giggles. With her legs in stirrups, speculum inserted, the young doctor tried to tweezer its wily brown body out of its inner sanctum, but it recoiled further into the pink cavern probably curling around her cervix. Thinking outside the box, the doctor hoisted her legs up in their stirrups, effectively forming a bucket with her vagina, and filled her up with salt water and waited until the poor innocent creature died so they could pluck out its withered body.

Vaginal foreign objects – as they’re known in the medical profession – come in all shapes and sizes. A drinking glass, a dead housefly, half a sweet potato (sprouted), a 0.35 liter brandy bottle, marbles, the cap to a hairspray aerosol, safety pins, jam jars and a handful of severed Bratz dolls’ heads have all been extracted from this genital treasure chest.

The worst thing about this particular ilk of self-inflicted medical ailment is what happens if the person decides that a visit to the doctor is just too embarrassing. Reassuring themselves that what goes up, must come down; many women avoid seeking medical help. Now this is the stuff of Freudian nightmares. Not to mention the urinary incontinence, foul smelling discharge, and discomfort; when the vagina recognises an object as foreign the vagina wall may calcify it into a hard mass in an attempt to limit damage. So in layman’s terms, your pussy turns weird shit to stone.

With that in mind I’ll leave you with the official medical advice on the matter: “Sexual activities resulting in painful placement of objects in the vagina should be avoided.”

DR MONA MOORE (not my real name, obvs)