A patient has had the better of me. On three separate occasions I inserted my gloved hand up his anal passage causing him what I believed to be excruciating pain, but no, the kinky masochist loved every second. I was merely a pawn in realising his sexual fantasies, which is certainly not in my job description.

He came into A&E with that bow-legged wobble that normally comes from a blood vessel bursting screw, and declined to sit down in the waiting room. He had tried to make his own anal beads using nuts and bolts in a condom, and the condom burst leaving the bits and bobs lost in his bum. I inserted my hand past his not-so-tight sphincter, right up to the wrist until I could extract the bolt, trying to stop the blunt edges causing too much pain. It was only after he came in two more times that it occurred to me, by the look of pained pleasure on his face, that the anal beads were only half the fun. The other half was having my hand wriggling around in his butt. I felt violated.

As we have seen with the vagina and penis, people will insert any available object into any available hole, and the anus is by far the favourite. We get at least five a week with non-kosher shit up their arse and it’s tedious. The only real pleasure in treating patients with foreign objects in their anus is listening to their excuses. One man claimed he kept his cucumbers in the shower, and had slipped and landed on it, hence why it was irretrievably lost in his anal passage.

Rectal vegetables are not unusual. The only limitation of the range of objects found in the anus is the capacity of the rectum to accommodate them. People are incredibly imaginative when it comes to autoerotic anal stimulation. Who looks at their hard-boiled egg at the breakfast table and decides it’d look better in your arse?

Animals are no exception. A 50-year-old man inserted a live eel in his rectum to “relieve constipation”. Unfortunately the eel ate its way through the bowel causing an anal perforation that necessitated surgery and two months of a colostomy bag. Why put it in headfirst? Gerbils are quite popular too for the apparently pleasant scratching sensation. One case involved a man who came in with side pain and the X-ray showed a gerbil had bitten, and suffocated in, his gut.

Other objects recovered include bedposts, doorknobs, mayonnaise jars, candles, a small pistol, a grocery and newspaper combo, a 12-inch long and 8-inch wide salami, tennis balls, an aluminum tube (used by a prisoner to store money and other valuables), axe handles, soldering irons, a frozen pig’s tail, a spatula and an ice pick. There was a case of removing a vibrator from a 65-year-old man who had had it in his rectum for 6 months and even travelled around the world with it. There was the 20-year-old who went to A&E with a half-full bottle of V8 in his descending colon. He had gone after it with a wire hanger attempting to get it out, shredding his colon in the process. The sad thing was he still lived with his parents and they came in to be with him during the surgery to remove it. He ended up shitting into a bag for the rest of his life.

So if you get your kicks from filling yourself with household goods, then what can you expect? The doctor will ask you how it happened. You can say you fell on an orange while standing on your kitchen counter to change a light bulb, but they won’t believe you, so you may as well be honest. You will have a digital rectal exam and perhaps an X-ray to determine the nature and position of the foreign body. Then normally we’ll just bend you over and dive in to pull it out, but if we can’t get a good grip, we’ll put you under first. It’s bit of a squeeze but you can get your whole hand into the rectum to retrieve an object from an anaesthetised patient.

Your risk factors include becoming an incessant farter with poor bowel control that will result in urgent need for immediate defecation. But the biggest risk is perforating your bowel, which is rare but can be deadly. One man was found to have the entire contents of his toolbox in his bowel at his autopsy.

So if you just can’t kick the habit of masturbating your bum hole with a marrow, then please just keep a good grip like this guy, so I don’t end up fishing it out.

DR MONA MOORE