I will tell you a story. This thread is about bacteria...so, my story will eventually dovetail. I did surgery for 35 years. General and trauma surgery. I got a call from a GP friend who asked me to see this fellow in the ER. He and his wife had watched a porno flick and then tried what they saw in the film....that being placing a 'new potato' (small red potato) on the end of a garden hose. The wife then inserted the potato and distal garden hose in the husbands rectum, then truned the water on full blast. Well, he blew out his colon. He was so filled with shame he did not seek medical help for 3 full days. The GP then told me he was not going to tell me that story, but that is what happened. Obviously he had an acute surgical abdomen. When I entered his abdomen fluid, feces, turnomas, ....all began to spill out. It was like a septic tank. I gagged, wretches, and dry-heaved,...but I began to clean it out of the abdomen. It took about three hours...first, simply picking turds out, then suctioning out floating remnants, then suctioning out the brown stool-stained fluid, We washed, and washed, sucked and sucked. We took laparotomy packs (over 100) and wiped out as much crap as we could. Slowly the fluid began to clear up, at first tea colored, then light brown,...on to clear. We had crap all over the OR. I put in 6 drains and closed the belly wall, but not the subcutaneous fat and skin. I packed the wound with Iodofor gauze.
Now I tell you all of this to say....I left in billions and billions of all kinds of bacteria, yeast, and fungi. Of course he was on triple antibiotic therapy. But.....there was no way to remove all of the microbes. I removed 98% of all bacteria....the immune system did the rest.
THis guy never even had a fever.
Now, the reason I told you this story. In surgery, we have an old saw...."The solution to pollution, is dilution".
Wash those damn chickens.
ERs do get some of the most interesting, er, stuff.
For the last few years I’ve been trying to follow some of the intestinal flora surveys, and it’s downright crowded in there. It’s a wonder that it ever works at all.
And then you get those boy wonders who were showering, when they slipped and fell and landed on a lemon. It happens often enough to make you wonder whether lemons should have warning labels.