truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

High-Maintenance Goddesses: In Ahmedabad District, India, in September, Ramveer Singh Baghel, 35, sliced off his tongue as an offering to the goddess Amba. His sacrifice made him an instant deity in the local temple, delaying his trip to the hospital.

In a delicate, two-hour procedure at a hospital in Newport Beach, Calif., in September, firefighters carefully sawed off the inch-thick metal dumbbell-tightening ring into which a man had inserted his penis three days earlier. He told surgeons his plan was to lengthen the organ, to, as he put it, "make me the chief of my tribe." By the time he got to the hospital, his member was swollen to more than twice its normal size, and sawing the ring off (without cutting the skin) was the only way to save it.

John Manley, 50, breathed pain-free in September for the first time in two years after surgeons discovered the source of his coughing and discomfort. Manley said he "like(s) to take big gulps of drink," which is his only explanation for why a 1-inch piece of a plastic utensil was lodged not in his stomach but in his lung. Duke University surgeon Momen Wahidi recalled the scene in the operating room as they tried to make out what the fragment was: "We started reading out loud, 'a-m-b-u-r-g-e-r'" (for Wendy's Old-Fashioned Hamburgers).

Three physicians, reporting in The Canadian Journal of Urology in July, described how they handled an emergency-room patient who arrived with a ballpoint pen in his urethra. The man, 57, had assumed that the insertion would be pleasurable, and when it wasn't, thought initially that maybe the pen was not in far enough. After pushing further, to even greater discomfort, he thought that if he pushed it all the way through, it would exit in his rectum, where he could remove it more easily. (Actually, they're not connected.) Doctors removed the pen with the same procedure used to remove kidney stones.

A man was almost killed in Rodgau, Germany, in July when, attempting to show friends he could spit a cherry pit the farthest off of a balcony, made a running start but accidentally toppled over the railing. He was hospitalized with hip injuries.

Nelson Blewett, 22, was treated for serious burns in Port Angeles, Wash., on May 18 after playing a game of TAG-tag with pals. They were spritzing each other with TAG body spray and then striking matches, creating mostly lower-risk flames. Then, perhaps inspired by too much beer, one friend added lighter fluid to the game. Blewett was afire for 30 to 45 seconds until he leaped from a second-story porch and rolled on the ground. (He survived but with "excruciating" second- and third-degree burns.)