As a surgeon, have you ever seen something in the operating room that made your stomach turn? Well, I have.
The patient was a very young woman who had been feeling pain when she peed, and a test had shown a large polyp with calcification inside her bladder. Doctors thought it could be cancer, so surgery was needed right away.
The surgery was urgent because of the size of the mass and the young age of the patient. If it was cancer, it could spread quickly and become life-threatening.
But when the surgeons opened her up, they were in for a big surprise. The mass wasn’t cancer at all. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a foreign object that didn’t even belong to the patient!
It was an IUD, a type of birth control device. This IUD had started in her womb, then moved through the walls of both her uterus and bladder, and ended up in her bladder, where it had calcified and looked like a polyp.
While the surgery had been complicated and confusing, the final diagnosis was a relief.
“Dear Vera, it wasn’t cancer at all. Just a traveling IUD.”
Sources: Sculpture by Sarah Lucas.
