Foreign Bodies in Bodies [LIST]

A butterfly, a nickel and a flashlight walk into a... You've probably heard jokes that start off that way, but I bet those jokes ended much differently than this story. More on that in a moment. There was a story this week about a man in downstate Illinois who had a turn signal lever from a 1963 Thunderbird removed from his arm after fifty-one years. The vintage car part was brand new when the guy was involved in a car accident half a century ago. It reminded me of the time when my younger son was two years old. He stuck a seed from an orange up his nose. Sounds hilarious. Until you spend an hour trying to remove it, and succeed only in pushing it further up the nasal canal. I was getting rather nervous by this point and was resigned to the fact that I will have to go to the ER to get this thing out. I tried a turkey baster to draw it out of there, and acting the part of Super Dad, I even put my mouth over his nostril to try to suck it out. I just gagged a bit as I typed that. I was out of ideas when I saw my son was working on a sneeze. I quickly covered the nostril that was void of any fruitseeds and when he sneezed, that orange seed shot out of his nostril like a bullet. I don't know who was more relieved, me or him. By the way, he wasn't the least bit bothered by this during the ordeal.

Now, getting back to the start of the joke at the top of the story. If you thought that butterfly, nickel and flashlight were walking into a bar, you'd be wrong. Try the human body. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission offers a searchable list of emergency room visits, and the stuff these doctors and nurses have to remove from various body parts are mind boggling. Our friends at deadspin.com compiled an uncomfortably large list of items that have made their way into places that nothing should call home. Makes my son's little orange seed ordeal seem pretty tame.