National Embarrassing Medical Moments Month

The Great Inflatable Tampon Incident of 2011

There’s humor everywhere…even in bloody medical emergencies.

In honor of “National Embarrassing Medical Moments Month,” at Doctor Funny, I’ve decided to share the tale of the night I thought I was going to die.

Warning: Not for the particularly squeamish. There’s going to be lots of blood imagery here.

I have a history of bad nosebleeds. But one night, I lost more blood than I knew a human body could carry.

Seriously, I made Carrie look anemic.

I had been sick for a few days before this harrowing event. Finals were the next week, so my blood pressure was a bit high. I was feverish and extremely congested, so I was taking both Sudafed and Advil — a horrible combination. The Sudafed dried me out to the point that my nose started bleeding and the Advil made it damn near impossible for clots to form. The result:

I created a red sea that not even Moses could split.

Thankfully, I came home from college to see my parents that weekend. My second nosebleed of the week began, so I went to the bathroom and got some tissues. It started out pretty standard. And then…the flood gates opened. Something burst. I lurched over my sink and bled like a faucet.

There was SO MUCH BLOOD. It showed no signs of stopping. We even had my neighbor (a nurse) stop by with medical nasal packing. I bled straight through it in less than 15 seconds.

The neighbor told me I needed to go to the ER. So my mother grabbed a mop bucket (for me to bleed into) and my step-father helped me stand up.

The funny thing about standing up when you lose that much blood is your legs kind of turn to jelly. My poor step-father was trying to get me to the car and I’m busy working on my Raggedy Andy impression. Thank God the man can catch (though in hindsight, it would’ve been funnier if he couldn’t).

We arrived at the ER and one of the nurses yelled exactly what you want to hear when your body is rebelling against you.

“OH MY GOD, DID HE GET HIT IN THE FACE?!”

At least I had confirmation that I did indeed look as terrible as I felt.

Enter the RHINO Rocket

So they wheeled me into the ER and introduced me to a curious little device known as a RHINO Rocket. Basically, it’s a tampon with a balloon in it. It’s shoved up your nose and inflated to control “epistaxis,” the fancy term for a nosebleed. I just learned that while writing this article. What can I say? Blood loss isn’t common on Sesame Street, so I never saw this as a Word of the Day.

So they shoved this thing up my nose (a feeling which still makes me shudder). That was uncomfortable enough, but then they inflated it. I still cringe whenever I see a balloon artist.

Imagine this: there’s a booger deep in your nose that’s bothering you and nobody is around. You know damn well you’re shoving your finger up there to remove that annoying gold nugget. But once you do, your finger swells up so much that it’s impossible to pull it back out of your nostril. That’s the closest comp I have to describe the sensation.

I had to have my super-absorbent friend shoved in my nose for 24 hours, then returned to the ER. They pulled it out of my nose — which was somehow SO MUCH WORSE than when it went in — and the bleeding instantly resumed. So they just shoved another one in there.

I died a little inside.

In total, I had to walk around with this thing in my nose for a week. This presented a few challenges.

First, the thing hangs out of your nose, and the tube they use to inflate it is just taped to your face. Plus it looked like I had snorted a jumbo jawbreaker up my nose. Trust me, with those accessories, you will get no warm greetings or well wishes from friends. Instead, you hear things like:

• HOLY SHIT, WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?
• Wow, did you get into a fight?
• What’s that thing hanging out of your face?

This brings me to the second challenge. Naturally, everyone wanted to know what happened to me. But because I was congested and had one side of my nasal passages completely blocked off, I had temporarily become a mouth breather.

This made it very difficult to talk. I would run out of breath mid-sentence and have to take dramatic pauses to deeply inhale before continuing. So every retelling of the event was basically performed by an asthmatic William Shatner. But that had its benefits too.

I returned to campus to explain my situation to my professors. And I must have looked damn pathetic because three of them exempted me from my final exams. Thanks, Shatner!

The End of a Bloody Saga

After several days of misery and many jokes at my expense*, I finally had a little cluster of veins cauterized by an ENT. For the first time in a week, they plucked out my inflatable tampon and there was no blood! And I could actually smell something. Granted, it was my own charred flesh and phantom whiffs of that scent still haunt me to this day, but I could smell, dammit!

• Most notably: “I’ve heard of supersized tampons, but damn, that’s overkill!”

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If you’d like to read some more funny stuff, check out this great piece by Kristen Stark! I’m still giggling about it!