An endoscope is a sophisticated tube with “steering” controls at the back end, a light and camera at the front end, and a thin, flexible pipe running the entire length that can accommodate a variety of tools. Internal medicine specialists frequently use these tools to take biopsies of the stomach and upper small intestine.

In emergency rooms, we chiefly use our endoscope to retrieve foreign objects from the esophagus or stomach of our patients without the need for surgery. This makes the procedure less expensive and has a much shorter recovery time.

Endoscopy is not always the answer, however. We do enjoy a high success rate, due to the fact that we only recommend attempting endoscopy when there is a high likelihood of success. When it appears that surgery is going to be necessary, we recommend going directly to surgery (otherwise, we are adding a surgical bill onto an endoscopy bill, and that doesn’t help anyone).

Some examples of items we’ve removed with the endoscope, avoiding more costly surgery and discomfort…

This penny had a hole cut into the center. Unfortunately for this dog, the penny was minted after mid-1982. At that time, the US Mint moved from making pennies that were 95% copper to a copper-wrapped zinc core (97.5% zinc). The hole in the middle of the coin exposed the zinc core immediately, and this patient suffered from anemia secondary to zinc toxicity. She did well, but she had to stay in our hospital for about a week!

This poor guy tried to vomit these stuff animals (he’d already removed the stuffing), but they were all bound together in one big mess, and they just wouldn’t come up. So we removed them, one at a time.

This one is harder to see, but if you look closely, you can see the straight line of this wooden skewer in the stomach on both views (living organisms don’t have many perfectly straight lines). This was difficult to remove because of the slime coating the skewer, and the need to grab it right at the end…