3 April 2016
YES, OF COURSE — the anniversary of a 28-year-old man in the Netherlands being ‘inspired’ by Jackass and coming close to death by swallowing the wrong kind of fish while shitfaced.
Scientific papers in learned journals are rarely funny, but Acta Oto-Laryngologica Case Reports vol.4, 2019 provides an exception.
It’s particularly good — in a rather grotesque way — on the actual course of events. The deadpan “person c administers wrongly applied Heimlich manoeuvre”, for example, is a satisfying turn of phrase, as well as a salutary reminder that doctors know more than us.
I would also suggest that the next sentence after that would be difficult to improve:
After several hours of unsuccessful self-applied treatment with more beer, honey and ice cream, the patient finally presented himself to the emergency department.
The patient, we are told, arrived with acute dysphonia (he was hoarse) and dysphagia (difficulty swallowing), but had been fortunate in avoiding dyspnoea (trouble breathing). So they shoved a tube in.
Under general anaesthetic, “the foreign body was removed by using a grasping forceps” — i.e. we yanked it out. But what had gone wrong? Why had some fish slid down easily, and another… not? Well, the first ones were goldfish, and this was a bronze catfish.
Yes, this is, basically, an entry in the Almost Darwin Awards, aka yet another example of young men being young men. The one in this case sobered up, suffered no lasting ill effects, and donated the fish to the Rotterdam’s Natuurhistorisch Museum’s Dead Animal Tales exhibition.
The museum’s website, incidentally, sports a photo of the unfortunate catfish, and an explanation of the exhibition’s origins
Yes, this account did mark the anniversary of 5 June 1995.
Obviously.
