I used to know a guy who worked as the admitting nurse in the emergency room of one of Melbourne’s largest hospitals.

We'll call him Walt, because i like literary references and I probably shouldn’t reveal his true name in this context.

Walt often volunteered to work the Friday/Saturday night shifts on a full moon, just, y’know, for the fun.

It is apparently completely true that people go even more nuts than usual under a full moon, and dozens of ‘em will end up in an emergency ward to have something weird extracted from somewhere even weirder.

Walt kept a special pair of terrifying antique forceps at his desk to wave around in front of the special extraction cases, he’d stand in front of them and smirk while he cleaned the grippy bits. He was my kinda guy.

Anyway, as he explained to me, it is not uncommon after couples have been together for a very long time, for a little bedroom ennui to set in (not the first line you want to hear in a story that ends in the emergency room, right? But, never mind, we go bravely on). In an effort to spice things up, such couples will often introduce foreign objects, not just into the bedroom, but into various convenient personal apertures as well. Whatever floats your boat I guess, and as long as the 15 kilo rubber chicken gives its full consent, who am I to object?

However, the human imagination and creativity knows no bounds, and the rubber chicken that weighs more than my dog was not the highpoint of his many things-extracted-from-orifices stories.

2am on the night of this particular full moon, and Walt saw the ambulance pull up outside. The doors flew open and the paramedics unloaded a middle aged man who was sitting very carefully on the gurney and screaming at the top of his voice. Bounding along behind him (in a very Tigger like fashion) was a woman in a dressing gown and both the (male) paramedics appeared to be trying to cross their legs as they walked.

Hmmmm…..

The gurney crashed through the doors and screaming man, dressing gown clad woman and leg crossing paramedics rolled to a stop in front of the admitting desk. Walt peered over the desk but could only see the screaming man sitting curiously still and holding on to something yellow. An enquiring look at the paramedics only got winces and shrugs in response. Walt told me that it was at that point that he started to get nervous, paramedics are not easy guys to scare. Eventually he turned to dressing gown clad girl and asked her what happened.

Here, almost verbatim is her story: “It’s our 10th anniversary together, we had a lovely dinner and then he took me home….he had covered the bed with my favourite flowers…and we umm, well, we decided to spice things up a bit….so we wanted to use the flowers …ummm my favourite flowers are daffodils….after 10 years, well, I guess, we’ve um…. we’ve had enough fun inserting things into me… so we decided to have a go at inserting things into him…not that we do that kind of thing….but…bottoms are icky (damn right!) so we thought it would be romantic to insert it into his um…male appendage…so we did…but then we realised that daffodil stalks feel all smooth if you stroke it upwards, but….they get all sharp the other way and when we tried to take it out all the spiky bits got stuck that way …. and I tried to get it out but I couldn’t ….. I tried pulling really quickly like a bandaid, y’know…..and now he won’t stop screaming…..you’re not going to have to chop it off are you???” Whereupon Walt and the paramedics all crossed their legs and winced and daffodil man screamed even louder.

Walt said he couldn’t bring himself to get out the special forceps that day. He figured that there wasn’t much point, there was nothing Walt could do to him that would be worse than what dressing gown girl had already done for their anniversary.

If anyone is still reading, well, I figure you’re probably female so you’ll want to know how they got it out.

Apparently it took a while, they had to call in the urologist (who nearly fainted when he saw what had happened) then the urologist had to call in another urologist (who snorted a bit when she saw what had happened) then they had to argue for a while about whether they would have to slice him down the middle to get it out, then they had to sedate and strap him to the gurney because he tried to remove their eyeballs with the antique forceps, then they had to argue for a bit longer until they eventually came up with an idea.

To get the daffodil out non-surgically they had to push it back in a bit to get all the rough bits to lie flat, insert a large tube over the top of the daffodil (while pushing the daffodil in slightly further at the same time, so the spikes wouldn’t get caught on the tube) then very slowly pull the tube and the daffodil out at the same time.

Ok everyone, take a deep breath and uncross your legs now.

Ahhhhh…. doesn’t that feel better?

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