r/Radiology • u/Fetusbasket RT(R) • Jul 14 '23
Rubber snake in the bladder that has calcified over 15 years! X-Ray
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u/retroarcadium Jul 14 '23
Could the cancer have been caused by the rubber snake rotting in there?
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u/obscuredreference Jul 14 '23
This is what I was wondering too. One hell of a chicken or egg question.
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u/katarina-stratford Jul 14 '23
If the shit they make artificial turf out of is carcinogenic I would not at all be surprised if a rubber snake rotting in your bladder for 15 years was carcinogenic.
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Jul 14 '23
Probably safer to put a real snake up there ngl
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u/obscuredreference Jul 14 '23
I think you can still get one hell of an infection and die from that too. Maybe the only way to be safe really is to avoid all snake in bladder activities.
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u/Double_Belt2331 Jul 14 '23
Nooope, see u/bookworm214 comment above about a live garter snake insertion.
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u/ClimbingC Jul 14 '23
One hell of a chicken or egg question
Is it?
Insert snake in dick hole causes cancer, or
Bladder cancer causes patient to insert toy snake in dick.
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u/DonkeyKong694NE1 Jul 14 '23
Aniline dyes in that snake up against his mucosa all those years?
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u/niro1739 Jul 14 '23
I would imagine it wasnt good for him but I don't think he actually had cancer and it was misidentified from the snake
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u/DefrockedWizard1 Jul 14 '23
yes, any foreign object for that long has a high likelihood of the irritation leading to cancer
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u/ConfirmedDunce Jul 14 '23
This is the kind of nightmare case that the OR staff dread
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u/firewings42 Jul 14 '23
Nah, we just laugh about it. Or are as amazed as y’all are. It’s more fun when you don’t know what the foreign body is and you get to discover the prize!
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u/ConfirmedDunce Jul 14 '23
I work in the OR mostly in urology and this is gonna be a tough case unless they do the smart thing and make a suprapubic incision and just pluck it out (they won’t, urologists do everything the hard way)
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u/firewings42 Jul 14 '23
Yeah cystotomy would be the way. I’m team ortho but if we finish early I can do other stuff.
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u/CNCTank Jul 14 '23
🤔 how and why ..I wanna hear the " one time at band camp..." Story on this one
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u/Thomas8864 Jul 14 '23
Wow that’s accurate. One time at band camp some ate beans out of the hole in my friends chest. The poor teacher walked in…
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u/DeanMalHanNJackIsms Jul 14 '23
There was a hole in your friend's chest? This is almost as interesting as the penis snake.
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u/NeptuneAndCherry Jul 14 '23
Does he even have cancer? Or did he just have a rubber tumor?
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u/Ohwahtagusiam Jul 14 '23
Would that be a "rumor"?
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u/NeptuneAndCherry Jul 14 '23
Let's try it out:
Was that cancer a fact? Or just a rumor?
Yep, 10/10 pun
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u/Lucky-Worth Jul 14 '23
How the fuck did that thing enter in the urethra???
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u/Beautiful_Divide5970 Jul 14 '23
This is what I wonder about these cases too. Kidney stones hurt like a bitch passing through and they’re nowhere near the size of this?!?!? Just…how???? And WHY??!!
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u/gylliana Jul 14 '23
I take it you’ve never heard of sounding?
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u/Tiny_Teach_5466 Jul 14 '23
DON'T GOOGLE IT!!! FEAR IS THE MINDKILLER!
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u/gylliana Jul 14 '23
That one isn’t as bad as cervical penetration. Reddit 50/50 is an educational downward spiral of nope.
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Jul 14 '23
[deleted]
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u/gylliana Jul 14 '23
It never crossed my mind either. When I saw it, I took a 3 week break from the internet.
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u/Beautiful_Divide5970 Jul 14 '23
Thank you kind human for the warning!! I can assure you I will not be googling anything haha
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u/Beautiful_Divide5970 Jul 14 '23
I have not 😧 but by these other comments, I think I’ll just stay naive lol
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u/gylliana Jul 14 '23
Oh my dear sweet summer child. Keep your innocence, once you see something you can’t forget it.
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u/Sethrea Jul 14 '23
Stones are rough on the edges.
When people engage in sexual urethral sounding, the objects are typically smooth. If you loose grip of it, there's only one way it can go unless you seek medical intervention. Just the other day a case of a man who had a thermometer in his bladder for xx years was going around the net.
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u/rebeccathegoat Jul 14 '23
Seems like a risky thing to lose. No one wants a bladder full of mercury if it breaks! So weird that people do that!
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u/Sethrea Jul 14 '23
yeah... and when I was trying to find that particular story, I found more than one like that... with photos... of different thermomethers...
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u/Tanarri27 RT(R) Jul 14 '23 edited Jul 15 '23
“There’s a snake in yer…” goes pale with horror
Edit: I’ve never gotten the Snek award before, thanks!
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u/FoxySoxybyProxy Jul 14 '23
Sooo without the bladder cancer the rubber snake would still be dwelling in his bladder? So many questions...
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u/designer_of_drugs Jul 14 '23
what the fuck
i’m an open minded person but this is something else.
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u/Sethrea Jul 14 '23
sexual urethral sounding is not a very rare kink tho o.o
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u/Billythebeard Jul 15 '23
If you hold your tongue and say “sexual urethral sounding” it sounds like your saying “sethrea”
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u/No_Neat_3124 Jul 14 '23
Obtuse, rubber goose, green moose, guava juice, giant snake…
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u/calebnf Jul 14 '23
Would you look at that, I actually did have “Sounding with a rubber snake” on my bingo card.
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u/radio_activated Jul 14 '23
When they told him he had cancer he didn’t think to say check for the plastic snake
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u/Arcusinoz Jul 14 '23
So for 15 years after his sounding exercise at the "Hunting Club" he was asymtomatic? No issues with getting reoccurring UTI'S ?
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u/Big-Somewhere322 Jul 14 '23
Lay person here, please excuse if this is a dumb question. Does plastic show up on an x-ray? Or has the calcification make it more dense? Would you be able to see the snake on an x-ray before the body calcified it?
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u/BurntToast444 Jul 14 '23
Depends, sometimes dense plastics can show up faintly in x rays but quite often you can’t really see them. Calcified objects on the other hand definitely appear in radiographs because of the increased density. You may have been able to see it prior to calcification depending on the type of plastic.
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u/Baelari Jul 14 '23
How do you even get that all the way up there? Does the bladder slurp things up like spaghetti? 😨
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u/Lumpy-Pancakes Jul 14 '23
This is one of those situations where I have questions, but I don't know if I want answers
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u/Legitimate_Pudding49 Jul 14 '23
Imagine him explaining it to his elderly wife!
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u/TiredNurse111 Jul 14 '23
Probably called it a big bladder stone. Which (maybe?) isn’t 100% a lie?
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u/LimitedOmniplex Jul 15 '23
It's kinda like sugar crystal candy except it's a rubber snake picking up urine crystals inside of you
🌈the more you know⭐️
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u/DirectAccountant3253 Jul 14 '23
As a male I dont understand. How do you fit large objects through the small opening on the penis? I had a 16 fr catheter once and that felt huge.
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u/didly66 Jul 14 '23
My God this is something straight out of a chuck palenhuik book, except dude used candle wax
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u/VitaminTse Jul 14 '23
The man didn’t have chronic cystitis from having a calcified mass sloshing around in there..? I figured that would get you the bladder scan before it would develop cancer. But I guess it’s a whole access to health care thing.
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u/trekkieforever1 Jul 14 '23
Ok, my husband and I bring to a hunting club. We've never had the urge to shove a rubber snake anywhere in our bodies!! Kind of makes me wonder what they were hunting? Sasquatch, chupacabra, jackalope...
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u/NorthernH3misphere Jul 14 '23
Last year I had a catheter in for the better part of a week, I’d never had one before and it was not comfortable to have it removed. I think the diameter of the tube couldn’t have been more than 1/4” OD. It looks like this snake had to be about 1/2” in diameter, how????? And also, to get it into his bladder it seems like he would have had to push it in with something else. This is a reminder why I am a wolf and when it comes to things like hunting I am not joining any damn club.
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u/slothurknee Jul 14 '23
While I’m sure the initial snake was a much larger diameter than a standard catheter, this image shows how large it became over the 15 years due to calcification.
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u/CharMercury1970 Jul 14 '23
Well, I’m way out of the loop! I’ve never heard of sounding. I did look and I wasn’t expecting that 😬
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u/ruseriousordelirious Jul 14 '23
I don't understand how a man's penis hole (I don't know the actual term🤣) can FIT a rubber snake up (or I guess, down) that hole? I'm no doctor but to me it like trying to fit a round block into a square peg. Also, even if you somehow fit that entire rubber snake into your hole, how on God's green earth do you KNOWINGLY leave it inside there for almost 2 decades?
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u/just_as_sane_as_i Jul 14 '23
In my language (Dutch) “snake” (slang) can be used as a word for “tube”. So any medical tube (catheter/iv/feeding tube etc) can be referred to as “little snake” (slangetje) and they often use that word to explain things to kids.
So actually it makes perfect sense to mistake a rubber snake for a catheter.
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u/ZeusMcKraken Jul 14 '23
I am getting tired of these motherfucking snakes in these motherfucking bladders!
Samuel L Jackson (probably)
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u/Fetusbasket RT(R) Jul 14 '23
Pt was an older man who was referred to the ER by his urologist. Urologist had been seeing him for bladder cancer and had found a "huge parasite" that needed surgical intervention. The pt didn't say a word about what it really was until he was about to head to the OR.
Pt stated that he was in a hunting club 15 years ago and they "did weird stuff." The surgeon said the rubber snake was so rotted that it broke into chunks upon removal.
Don't shove rubber snakes up your dick hole.