A Turkish hospital that let it be known that it had treated an imam who had bits of cucumber lodged up his bum has been criticised for leaking information about a patient.

The leak, according to this report, led to the suspension of the 39-year-old unnamed Muslim cleric who went to the emergency room of the hospital in the early morning hours of June 23 with severe abdominal pain and bleeding.

The doctors reportedly took pieces of cucumber out of his rectum, and the official diagnosis in the incident was:

Bleeding in the anus and rectum and foreign object in the rectum.

The imam was discharged on June 24 after treatment.

After the story made it to the local press, an official investigation was launched by the local branch of the Religious Affairs Directorate, or Diyanet, of which the imam was an employee.

He was suspended immediately.

The Chamber of Doctors slammed the hospital officials for leaking information about a patient.

Said Ardil Bayram Sahin, a member of the Istanbul Chamber of Doctors’ Human Rights Commission.

The imam applied to a hospital for a medical condition. It is a crime to have leaked the information of a patient.

And he warned:

Such rights violations may prevent people with various sexual practices, especially those who are public employees, from seeking medical assistance.

Back in 2008, another unnamed cleric had to have a potato removed from his anus.

The clergyman, in his 50s, told nurses at a Sheffield hospital that he had been hanging curtains when he fell backwards on to his kitchen table.

He happened to be nude at the time of the mishap, said the vicar, who insisted he had not been playing a sex game.

The vicar had to undergo a delicate operation to extract the object, one of a range of odd items medics in Sheffield have had to remove from people’s backsides or genitals.

These included a can of deodorant, a cucumber, a Russian doll – and a carnation.

A & E nurse Trudi Watson, of Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital, said:

He explained to me, quite sincerely, he had been hanging curtains naked in the kitchen when he fell backwards on to the kitchen table and onto a potato. But it’s not for me to question his story. He had to undergo surgery to have it removed.

She advised anyone tempted to use such objects in sex games to think again.

It can be very dangerous and potentially life-threatening. Surgery can lead to infection, nasty scarring, and it could possibly end up with the person having to use a colostomy bag as a result.

A hospital trust spokeswoman in Sheffield said:

Like all busy hospitals we do see some unusual accidents. But our staff deal with them in a discreet, professional and kind way.

When I was living in UK, I shared a house in London with an American doctor who was called out one night to attend to a patient who had a can of insecticide lodged in his anus. The patient told A&E staff that he’d accidentally swallowed it!

Hat tip: Antony Niall