People Talk About Their Most Embarrassing Medical Emergencies

From user R3m3mb3rM3:

I stapled my thumbs together. After three minutes of painful hand spinning, I used my teeth to pull it out.

I was fiddling with a stapler in my hands while watching my brother playing some PC games when I suddenly felt pain in my thumbs. Though it began to hurt like crazy, I kept quiet because I didn't want my brother to see how stupid I am. After I pulled that thing out, the two tiny red dots on my thumbs didn't bleed, but they burned like fire.

From user INeedAShower:

I used to have fairly long hair, and used a lot of bobby pins because of it. One morning I had the bobby pins between my lips while I stick them in my hair, and without thinking, put my head back and a bobby pin promptly slid down my throat and got stuck.

I didn't want to call for an ambulance or anything because I felt really stupid, so I decided to call my best friend. At the time we had this nasty old phone that lived on the ground, and I started to cry as I went to pick it up. The mixture of a sob and leaning over brought it up again, in a little mix of spit and blood.

From user blatant-disregard:

I once tried to make a plaster cast of my face for a Halloween mask, and figured a bunch of Vaseline would keep it from sticking to my beard, mustache, and eyebrows.

It was totally ineffective.

The plaster dried completely and enmeshed in my facial hair, fusing the cast to my face. My eyes and mouth were covered, and I had placed drinking straws in my nose to breathe. Minor panic ensued. I debated calling for help (roommate was out of town), but was too embarrassed to do so. Finally, after stumbling blindly around the apartment for a while, and trying various methods to remove the cast (including a hammer - ouch) I figured out that water and pliers would soften and crush the plaster. I spent the next two hours in the shower painstakingly removing it all.

From user Beatrixie:

Once, when I was 12 and my sister was 10, we were home - without parental supervision - during winter break. It was about 11 in the morning and we were still in our pajamas, and spending the morning watching movies and playing Yahtzee. At one point, we pulled out the bed on our fold-out couch. We were horsing around and then my sister laid on the bed and told me to fold her into the couch.

So I folded the bed, and attempted to push it down into the couch, and was able to push it partly back down into the couch hole. The pressure from the folded bed basically started crushing and squishing my sister (of course), and she couldn't breathe. I tried to pull the bed back out, but it was suddenly too heavy. So she was stuck, folded up in the bed, with the air being squeezed out of her. She started saying, "Call 911! Call 911!" as I kept using all my strength to pull the bed up.

I didn't want to call 911, though, because I was embarrassed that our apartment was messy, we were still in our under things, and I was afraid of some fire department guys coming in here and seeing what we'd gotten into. So I kept tugging and eventually was able to pull the bed back out of the couch.

Sort of dodged a bullet there.

From user catawompus:

I was chewing on a guitar pick, medium-sized and Dorito-shaped. I laughed, sucked my breath in, and lodged the pick in my throat. I managed to swallow it, and I immediately drank three cups of fiber. My mom had to call the doctor. I didn't feel it come out, and ass far as I know it's still inside me.

The best thing was the doctor's reaction. He acted like this happened often, saying 'Oh yeah, if you don't notice it in your stool or anything, just assume it's passed.'

From user devilbird99:

When I was little, I got a magnet stuck in one nostril and then used another to try and get it out, leading to two nostrils clogged with magnets. Lots of sneezing later, one came out. After a visit to a parent's friend who is a doctor, the other came out with tweezers.