What colour-mari are your stools?

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7521.881

BMJ 2005;331:881 (15 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7521.881

Filler

What colour-mari are your stools?

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

My mother, who had undergone endoscopy a few months earlierto investigate what thankfully turned out to be irritable bowelsyndrome, caused me no end of worry when she informed me thatshe had black and tarry stools. I was contemplating sendingher back to the gastroenterologist for a consultation, whenshe mentioned, in the course of the conversation, the marvellousnew Italian restaurant that had just opened. Somehow a bulbflashed in my head, and I asked her, hesitantly, what she hadeaten.

"Squid ink pasta," she replied, and wittered on about how hardit was to clean off her new blouse after spilling some on herself.

This brought to mind how one of our colleagues had, a few daysearlier, fretted about the possibility of gastrointestinal bleedingand underlying malignancy when he, too, had passed black tarrystools. We reminded him of the huge plate of squid ink . . . [Full text of this article]

Erle C H Lim, consultant neurologist

(mdcelch@nus.edu.sg)
Department of Medicine, National University Hospital, Singapore

Raymond C S Seet, registrar, Benjamin K C Ong, associate professor and head, Vernon M S Oh, professor and senior consultant

Department of Medicine, National University Hospital, Singapore