MEDICAL BAG
This month’s patients include a trucker with an air line in his bottom, the Finsbury Park castrator and a man who has been isolating for over a year
INFLATED TRUCKER
For once, the “I fell on it, and it went up my bottom” excuse seems to be genuine. In May 2011 New Zealand trucker Steven McCormack fell between his truck and its trailer and broke an air line. The nozzle penetrated his buttocks and continued to pump air at the rate of 100lb per square inch (7 kilogram-force per square centimetre). “I felt the air rush into my body and I felt like it was going to explode from my foot,” he said. “I had no choice but just to lie there, blowing up like a balloon.” Other truckers rescued him, turned off the hose and put him on his side to help him to breathe, but not before the air pressure had separated most of his fat from his muscle, leaving McCormack in excruciating pain. In hospital, he described his skin as feeling “like a pork roast” with crackling on the outside and soft squishy pork underneath. Doctors were surprised the air had not broken his skin. McCormack’s head and neck were swollen and his lungs needed draining and it took him three days to deflate by burping and farting out the air. He needed an extended stay in hospital. but made a full recovery. iflscience.com, 2 Feb 2022.
LONDON EUNUCH MAKER
Police raided a basement flat in Finsbury Park, London, and arrested a 44-year-old-man on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm (GBH) after discovering he had castrated dozens of men there and livestreamed the operations on a pay-per-view channel under the name “The Eunuch Maker”; six other men were also arrested elsewhere as part of the investigation. The Norwegian-born suspect has no medical qualifications and carried out the procedures with a specialised castration device known as a burdizzo, insisting that he did so in a “very professional way”. Neighbours, however, describe regularly seeing ambulances turning up at the property and taking people away.
The suspect, who is also an amputee, claimed to have undergone the procedure himself and to have carried it out on 58 other men, storing the removed genitals in his freezer and in jars of alcohol in the flat. He had said in an online interview that he has had his own genitals completely removed because he wished to “look like a Ken doll with
He wanted to “look like a Ken doll with nothing down there”
nothing down there”; this is apparently known as “a smoothie”. It is believed that the man was an adherent of the genital nullification, or “Nullo” movement, which involves people who do not wish to identify as either male or female, often seeing themselves as asexual.
They are thought to be inspired by Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama who had his penis and testicles surgically removed at the age of 23, subsequently cooking and serving them at a staged banquet – cannibalism is legal in Japan. He later cut off his nipples as well. It is estimated that there are 10,000 to 15,000 voluntary “Nullos” worldwide, and an academic study in 2014 found that two thirds never tell anyone they have no genitalia, including their families. As it is expensive and difficult to have the procedure carried out by a hospital, most people have their genitals removed by amateur “cutters”, often moonlighting doctors or vets.
The Daily Mail quoted a castrated vicar named Benedict, who said: “It’s nowhere near as weird and difficult to try to become a eunuch now as it was 30 years ago.” D. Telegraph; standard.co.uk; D.Mail, 7 Feb 2022.
DUCK!
Animal health authorities attempting to contain a particularly virulent new strain of the H5N1 bird flu in the UK discovered the first British case of bird to human transmission had taken place in Devon. The extremely appropriately named Alan Gosling, 79, was found to have picked up the infection from his flock of 20 Muscovy ducks, which were culled to prevent any further spread of the infection, while Mr Gosling himself was quarantined. D.Telegraph, 7 Jan 2022.
HEADACHE SURPRISE
After suffering from violent headaches for most of his life, a 28-year-old man named pseudonymously as Xiao Chen eventually went to hospital in Shenzhen, China, when the headaches started to become
COVID NOCEBO
After examining data from 12 Covid vaccine clinical trials, scientists in the US concluded that the “nocebo effect” accounted for 76% of common side effects people reported after their first Covid vaccination, and 52% of those after their second. Nocebo is a negative version of the better-known placebo effect, where negative expectations of the patient regarding a treatment cause the treatment to have a more negative effect than it otherwise would have. In this case, it produced side effects like headache, mild fatigue and arm pain, which researchers found were more likely to be the result of anxiety, expectations and the misattribution of various unconnected ailments rather than having been vaccinated. theguardian.com, 18 Jan 2022.
COVID MIRACLE
Dularchand Munda from Bokaro, India, who was paralysed and lost his voice after an accident four years ago, startled medics when he began to move and speak again after receiving his Covishield Covid vaccination. “Glad to have taken this vaccine… My voice came back, and my feet also moved,” he said. Later he stood up and managed to walk. Local health official Dr Jitendra Kumar said he was “amazed to see this, but it needs to be ascertained by scientists. Had he recovered from a medical condition not more than some days old, it could be understood, but recovering suddenly from a four-year-old medical condition after taking the vaccine is unbelievable.” ndtv.com, 14 Jan 2022.
COVID CURSE
Muzaffer Kayasan, 56, from Turkey came down with Covid in November 2020 and has been self-isolating, either at home or in hospital, ever since. While he recovered from Covid relatively quickly, the virus seems to have remained active in his system and he has continued to test positive for it, 78 times in all. Kayasan has leukæmia and so is immunocompromised, which means his immune system has not been able to clear the virus from his body. He has been prescribed drugs to boost his immunity, but they have not yet been effective, and he cannot be vaccinated due to his weak immune system. “I have no problem here other than being unable to touch my loved ones. It is very hard. I can’t even get vaccinated because of my condition,” he says. He has been pleading with authorities to find a solution, but so far there is no end in sight. aa.com.tr, 6 Feb 2022.
Pareidolia, the human propensity to see recognisable images in random patterns, is implicated in a significant number of fortean phenomena. Particularly common is face pareidolia, where we perceive illusory faces in inanimate objects, and which is responsible for things like the Cydonia face on Mars and the many Jesuses in pieces of toast and other unlikely items, as well as our propensity to see cheerful plug sockets and sad looking houses. Now, in a paper presented at the Vision Sciences Society annual meeting, researchers have looked more deeply into how we perceive illusory faces. They collected 256 images of illusory faces in a variety of objects including potatoes, purses and peppers, and used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system to recruit nearly 3,000 people to rate characteristics of these faces. They discovered that most people saw the illusory faces as happy and young, but also discovered a strong gender bias, with faces being far more likely to be perceived as male than female. Journal of Vison, Sept 2021.