Six doctors swallowed Lego heads (2022)

https://defector.com/an-oral-history-of-the-time-six-doctors-swallowed-lego-heads-to-see-how-long-theyd-take-to-poo

by zdw • 3 years ago

148 122 3 years ago

gumby8• 3 years ago

I once got into an argument with a coworker about the non-reactivity and biocompatibility of PTFE (Teflon). What a fool: I had worked with the stuff on medical devices at a previous startup.

In any case out of annoyance I swallowed some teflon plumbing tape. A few days later I had to take an international flight and, ta-da, excreted it in the aircraft toilet. That was lucky as I had a convenient metal shelf and not a bowl of water. As I had predicted it was intact and perfectly white.

I sent my colleague a photo from my phone. He was annoyed when I got home.

PS: I had been carrying around a cheap disposable pen for this purpose. I stole it from his desk.

BrianOnHN• 3 years ago

Impressive dedication to science.

gumby8• 3 years ago

Thanks! I prefer to think of it as pettiness or peevishness. I knew there would be no risk.

unsupp0rted• 3 years ago

I assume the majority of the most important science humans have done was to win an argument or impress a woman (or, more rarely but more notably, a man).

PakG1• 3 years ago

In the fashion of Barry Marshall. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...

cm2187• 3 years ago

I hope he recovered his pen.

gumby8• 3 years ago

Ha ha I should have considered that. Then again it could have led to an awkward situation while crossing a border.

I remember carefully depositing it into the rubbish bin of the toilet (the hinged door is always so small). And washing my hands really well.

austinjp• 3 years ago

A few *days* later? I guess I don't know the expected intestinal transit time for teflon tape.

So it emerged white. Firstly, that seems odd. Secondly, how do you know no particulates were shed inside you? Surely just eyeballing it isn't going to tell you much?

gumby8• 3 years ago

So it emerged white. Firstly, that seems odd.

I think it would be odd had it not emerged white. It was white thread tape (I've never seen any other color). And it's not like it should react with the contents of my bowel.

Secondly, how do you know no particulates were shed inside you? Surely just eyeballing it isn't going to tell you much?

You're right, except that I already knew the answer: as I mentioned in my comment I'd already used PTFE in a previous job; I've dissected and otherwise processed innumerable tissue samples from animals injected with various biocompatible polymers in the process of preclinical studies. Teflon is quite common in implanted medical devices for the very reason that it is safe and doesn't tend to break down.

Some polymers are considered safe but clear from the body through mechanisms nobody has worked out. For example the polymer fillers some people have injected to push out wrinkles are, as far as I remember, a safe mw of PEG that just seems to...go away.

I've used PEG as a drug carrier but have used the drug to determine how it was breaking down (or microscopy), rather than trying to assay the carrier itself. FDA is super concerned about the API (i.e. drug) and most excipients, but for a neutral GRAS carrier like PEG. meh. Though they do care a lot that you make sure the mw is in one of the GRAS ranges!

giantg25• 3 years ago

"Secondly, how do you know no particulates were shed inside you?"

It's PFAS, so he likely got a high load of forever chemicals that are still in him today.

PebblesRox• 3 years ago

When my oldest was a baby, he swallowed a shiny star sticker. I found it in his diaper a day or two later, still shiny and still star-shaped.

canadianfella• 3 years ago

Gross.

atomlib• 3 years ago

That's enough Hacker News for today. You people are already acting Hacker News.

saghm• 3 years ago

I sent my colleague a photo from my phone. He was annoyed when I got home.

Did you...clean it off? Or just take a picture of it in the bowl along with the rest of the contents? I'd like to think I could the former, but if one of my coworkers sent me a picture of their faeces, annoyed wouldn't even begin to describe how I'd feel. Being completely incorrect on a technical matter, even foolishly so, isn't anywhere close to warranting being treated that shitty (pun fully intended but unfortunately not enough to mitigate my disgust at the idea of being sent a picture like this from a collegeaue).

oxfordmale• 3 years ago

I can't think of any possible reason your colleague would be annoyed with a photo of your excretions in an aircraft toilet.

psychphysic• 3 years ago

Not as annoyed as the TSA agent knuckle deep in you worried about a wrap being undone internally.

resoluteteeth• 3 years ago

I had been carrying around a cheap disposable pen for this purpose

For what purpose? Picking out the PTFE tape?

gumby8• 3 years ago

Yes. What tool would you have used?

laxatives• 3 years ago

It seems like an interesting topic, but this is the academic equivalent of turning a 30 second youtube video into a 15 minute presentation with intro, requets for engagement, outro, journal of feelings and learning, etc.

The result is an average of 1.71 days for an adult patient.

SV_BubbleTime• 3 years ago

Exactly, and the big reveal of “one was never found this is his story”… was he just didn’t look. Hard hitting stuff right there.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

My experience is that corn on the cob is about equally effective and surely tastier.

Terretta• 3 years ago

Though a test subject might prefer if the corn were removed from the cob before ingestion.

adolph2• 3 years ago

Early North American settlers used corn cobs. They were abundant, they were soft and they were easy to handle. Sailors used something called a 'tow rag'. A tow rag was a long piece of frayed rope that dangled in the water.

https://www.cottonelle.com/en-ca/tips-advice/toilet-paper-10...

dhon_• 3 years ago

This man apparently had a lego piece stuck in his appendix for 40 years after swallowing it on a dare https://metro.co.uk/2005/02/17/lego-removed-from-body-591849...

adolph2• 3 years ago

A lithopedion…, or stone baby, is a rare phenomenon which occurs most commonly when a fetus dies during an abdominal pregnancy,[1] is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies on the outside as part of a foreign body reaction. . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithopedion

tomcam• 3 years ago

omg

ikr678• 3 years ago

This was a neat plot point on a tv show called the Beforeigners.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

Wasn’t there a guy who tied floss to a tooth and then swallowed like fifty feet of it, flossing himself and demonstrating that humans are toruses?

I can only find references to removed YouTube videos about this.

convolvatron• 3 years ago

I did see a TV segment showing some kind of ascetic in NYC that fed a length of string through his body and could slowly tug it back and forth over a period of days. I can't remember why he thought this was a good idea.

cmrdporcupine• 3 years ago

Please tell me that someone 'plucked' this string and music was made :-)

mumble mumble cosmic string vibrational mumble mumble

M3L0NM4N2• 3 years ago

So uh... How did he get it out?

chrischen• 3 years ago

Probably want to go pull downwards instead of upwards to avoid shit in mouth.

sorenjan• 3 years ago

Yup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDqpXSBRVc0

russdill• 3 years ago

Linear foreign bodies are quite dangerous and result in quite a few veterinary surgeries.

Aperocky2• 3 years ago

When I was 3-4 years old, I swallowed a dime.

My parents followed my bowel movements intensely, and finally after 2 days it emerged from the other end.

One of the earliest memory that I had of excrement - with a shiny object embedded, and happy and relieved faces of family members.

xahrepap• 3 years ago

I have a vivid memory of myself swallowing pennies when I was probably 4. I think I saw my dad pretend to do it for a magic trick or something. I did it in secret … For all I know it’s still there. :)

Aperocky2• 3 years ago

pennies? as in multiple? That's strong digestive system right there.

userbinator• 3 years ago

When I read your comment, I almost mentally autocorrected "faces" to "feces". The brain works in strange ways.

rozab• 3 years ago

It absolutely shocked me when I found out that people were searching their own poo. I'll hold my hands up and confess that I never really did.

...what the hell, Damian? I'm surprised they let him talk to the press after he ruined their study!

joshuahedlund• 3 years ago

Whenever microplastics in fish or food comes up, I’m curious what percent of them just pass right through

lsllc• 3 years ago

So is this a sort of "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" [0] idea except you have a fish swallow the Lego head, then you eat the fish. Next up you have a Mahi-Mahi or a Tuna eat your fish that ate the Lego head, then you eat that bigger fish ...

Where does this end, eating a Polar Bear that ate the fish that ate the fish that ate the Lego head? So yeah, you end up with Polar Bear liver poisoning. Yep, definitely want to avoid those micro plastics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Was_an_Old_Lady_Who_Swal...

petermcneeley2• 3 years ago

From the article.

"The tiny batteries can get stuck in and severely burn the esophagus within two hours, which can lead to major injury or death."

So yes small things can get stuck in a child's digestive track. Why are these doctors trying to prove the opposite by demonstrating that an adult can easily digest a (common) child size object?

teruakohatu• 3 years ago

It's explained the first couple of lines of the article. They wanted to see how long plastic objects would pass through the system. They couldn't ethically ask a child to do, so themselves was the next best thing.

petermcneeley2• 3 years ago

Is it ethical to perform an experiment on an adult and then say that the result applies to a child?

lll-o-lll3• 3 years ago

The batteries are dangerous because of their chemistry. Deadly dangerous. There is no danger in swallowing Lego heads. Which was the point. Be aware of what’s actually going to harm your kid.

luxuryballs2• 3 years ago

I thought they were trying to measure the passing time, not checking for danger. I don’t think there’s any doubt in their minds that there is danger.

epakai• 3 years ago

We had a teen swallow a coin cell and it was allowed to pass. The biggest factors for retrieval seem to be size, a small child may have the object stick, and then if the battery ruptures. The ER doctors seemed satisfied it hadn't done so, and sent us on our way.

cactusplant7374• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/bluesaint72/status/1065982322003066881?s...

I find it bizarre that they rescued it from the sewer each time.

giantg25• 3 years ago

Seems like this could be filed adjacent to "meetings that could have been an email".

neilv• 3 years ago

On that fateful day, on opposite sides of the globe in the United Kingdom and Australia

To control for Coriolis effect?

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/how...

dqpb• 3 years ago

Five of the pediatricians recovered their Lego heads in a matter of days. One pediatrician never recovered his Lego head. This is their story.

Spoiler, the sixth guy never looked for it.

owenversteeg• 3 years ago

The article was funny, but this is interesting:

I'm now a now a professor of pediatric emergency medicine, I have a quite large research portfolio. For what it's worth, I'm probably one of the leading children's emergency medicine researchers in the UK. But the research that has probably had the most impact is this, out all the stuff that I've done. I'm not sure how I feel about that. But if I go to my deathbed, and this is my most important contribution to science, well maybe that's not such a bad thing.

So, you can work hard, graduate medical school, become a professor, get to the top of your competitive field full of smart people, and publish a "quite large" body of research in prestigious journals - but of all of that, swallowing a Lego head ends up your most important contribution to science.

yesenadam• 3 years ago

Henry: I came up with the acronyms kind of on the spot, about the Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) test and the Found and Retrieved Time (FART).

idiocrat• 3 years ago

[...] We know that number one ingested foreign body in children are coins. They're the things that kids swallow. [...]

When the first child swallows a coin, the parents are in shock! Calling ambulance!

When their second child swallows a coin, the parents are calm -- they already know it will pass out by itself.

When their third child swallows a coin, the parents are making jokes: "That flushed penny we will deduct from your pocket money."

jaclaz2• 3 years ago

Side note, I think there is something way off in:

Henry: We get people to swallow pill cameras all the time in our gastro department, and they're bigger than that. The numbers that we'd learned, although I'd learned as part of my pediatric training around what you will and won't pass and where the danger zones are, is that if something's greater than 110 millimeters, then it won't get around your duodenum.

110 mm is large, it is roughly 4 inches!

I doubt that something 110 mm in any of the three dimensions (apart maybe something like a piece of string) can be actually swallowed.

It cannot be 11 mm (as the lego head is about that size, and doesn't look like being near the "limit").

vidarh• 3 years ago

You got me to measure my jaw opening out of curiosity, and it doesn't open further than maybe 60mm (left-right) and 40mm (teeth to teeth).

I'm not sure I want to see someone opening their mouth wide enough to get anything 110mm diameter into it, much less swallow it.

EDIT: Maybe he meant something rigid 110mm in any dimension (so stick, for example)?

newaccount74• 3 years ago

110mm is roughly the size of a popsicle stick. I guess you could swallow it if you tried hard enough...

jaclaz2• 3 years ago

Surely, but I don't want to try, historically there is the Chevalier Jackson collection:

https://muttermuseum.org/exhibitions/chevalier-jackson-colle...

that has many interesting items, including spoons and keys, that are about that size.

I could only find a picture of some of these on a Lancet article:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

There are reports of even bigger/longer objects, such as a tootbrush (8 inch/20 cm long):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3080583/

but they are recorded as exceptional, I was initially thinking of something loosely spherical, in that case it is more probably something less than 20 mm or 4/5 of an inch in size/diameter that can be ingested, bar the exceptional cases.

But all these recorded items seem like having needed to be removed, I couldn't find anything about something (say) 100 mm long that managed to "pass through" naturally.

candeira• 3 years ago

"defector.com" and not "defecator.com"?

DrNosferatu• 3 years ago

Seriously:

Shouldn't "defector.com" here be "defecator.com"?

Six doctors swallowed Lego heads (2022)

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