Wine Glass in the Foot: A Case Study

​Emergency department providers welcome the weird, the wild, the wonderful, and the unexpected. Routine chest pain workups and negative abdominal CTs occasionally bore us. Last summer we had the pleasure of meeting a man who was a line cook at a local restaurant. He came via ambulance for a foreign body in his foot. What we saw was unanticipated—he arrived with half a wine glass lodged in the sole of his foot.​ The stemware was lodged in the patient's foot, going through his shoe and sock. Photos by Martha Roberts.The patient was laughing and not in much pain. He said he had a high pain tolerance and could barely feel the glass at this point. The question remained: How do we remove this thing? Do we x-ray it first? Do we attempt to dislodge it in any way or secure it so it doesn't come out and then contact our surgical team? Because we could not see how far the glass went into the foot, we had no idea if it could potentially have passed through an artery or a bone. So we decided to x-ray it. Luckily, the patient was wearing slip-on plastic shoes that allowed us to image his foot without blocking much of our view.When the films came back, we were relieved to see the glass had only partially penetrated the sole of his foot. We gently removed the shoe with the glass in place and quickly applied pressure to the area. We sent him back for repeat films after copiously irrigating the area and elevating it.The ProcedureKnown/unknown foreign body removal of the extremit...
Source: The Procedural Pause - Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs