It Might Get Messy

You can surmise you’re in trouble when you’re drifting in and out of a post-surgical stupor and you hear the nurse shouting on the phone to her supervisor. “THEY ASSIGNED ME THIS PATIENT AND HE’S KIND OF SLOPPY AND NOW HE’S SPRAYING BLOOD AND SALIVA AND I DON’T THINK I CAN TAKE IT.” And of course you want to help the poor kid, but between the blood loss, the narcotics, the pain, and the shock, you immediately pass out again.

When you come to, shifts have changed and it’s a new, more mature nurse. George had apparently seen plenty of “sloppy” patients and wasn’t intimated. Of course, he also had some new weapons in his arsenal.

Leeches. I know, you learned in Bio 101 that leeches used to be used to “bleed” patients in Medieval times. And that there was some kind of revival of interest in leech therapy in recent years. But you never thought you’d see it in action.

Or feel it. Or taste it. I’ve seen some big leeches in my time, mostly on the backs of turtles in stagnant water. They don’t look appetizing.

When the tongue-shaped chunk of thigh muscle grafted into my mouth started to fail, the recently micro-stitched veins were the first things to crack under the strain. Too much pressure, too much blood, too much general ickiness for the delicate vein structures to take. 

And how do you clean up excess blood, mass of loose fluid, snootfull of general ickiness? Leeches, of course! Why didn’t I think of that?

Apparently, you just order them like any pharmaceutical product. They come in a nice little harness, so they can be dropped into your mouth, taped to your cheek, and recovered after they have filled their blobby bodies with blood and other goop. They don’t chew blood vessels (saving those veins), and they can suck up huge quantities of material.

Here’s how they come from the pharmacy, freshly prescribed:

Here’s one in its little harness, ready to be dropped into the patient’s mouth:

Let’s explore the sort of patient who might benefit from the ancient-art-made-new of leech therapy.

THOSE OF YOU WITH DELICATE SENSIBILITIES SHOULD ABSOLUTELY TURN AWAY NOW. It’s about to get ugly.

First, such a patient from the outside. This joker has had his tongue excised and replaced with a piece of thigh muscle, a port run from his shoulder to his pericardium (more on that later), a tracheotomy tube inserted, and other major knife-driven insults. Don’t bother to count the staples. 

Here’s the mouth full of goop that has the little flock of leeches itching to get at it. Most of the contents here just continually bubbled up from my throat, hour after hour. Necessitating some way to clear things up (leeches) and some way to make up the loss (something like 14 units of blood over several days).

Note at first the leeches seemed tasteless. Somewhere on the second day, they started to have a flavor, somewhere between the smell of an algae-encrusted pond in late summer and a salt marsh at low tide on a hot summer day. In other words, vaguely disgusting. This, coupled with the tiny cross-shaped razor cuts of their rear anchor and forward mouth, made the whole experience really bizarre.

Here’s a leech, having filled its gut, attempting to escape.

Because after being used for therapy, the leeches were drowned in alcohol. Which I suppose may not be the worst way to go after a huge meal. 

Stay tuned to this weblog, everybody. Not sure where we’ll go next, but rest assured it’ll involve massive surgery and plenty of discomfort… .