Bowel pain caused by sachet of sauce

A WOMAN thought she was suffering from a serious bowel disease for six years before doctors discovered some plastic packaging piercing the wall of her intestine.

The 41-year-old patient suffered bouts of acute abdominal pain and bloating lasting up to three days, prompting doctors to diagnose her symptoms as Crohn’s disease.

Doctors at Heatherwood and Wexham Park Hospital, Slough, eventually decided surgery was the only option when the patient failed to respond to standard treatment, a case study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) said.

But keyhole surgery found an inflamed mass in the small intestine, revealing two pieces of plastic packaging bearing the Heinz branding.

The plastic appeared to come from a sachet of sauce (pictured inset).

Once the packaging was removed, the patient’s symptoms were cured almost immediately and she was still symptomfree five months after surgery.

She had no memory of consuming a meal involving the product found perforating the wall of her gut.

Doctors said it was the first case of ingested plastic packaging mimicking the symptoms of Crohn’s disease.

“It is important to consider alternative surgical diagnoses in patients with presumed Crohn’s disease unresponsive to standard treatment,” the report said.

Meanwhile, a woman was nearly blinded by a Christmas card when a piece of glitter worked its way into her eyeball.

The 49-year-old attended the ophthalmology department of Singleton Hospital in Swansea suffering from a painful, reddened eye, loss of vision and a swollen eyelid.

Doctors spotted a lesion on the patient’s cornea and initially suspected it had been caused by a herpes simplex infection, according to the BMJ.

But when the lesion was examined under a powerful microscope, a shiny surface was spotted inside.

The patient then remembered getting glitter in her eye when it rubbed off a Christmas card.

The glitter had formed into a clump causing a lesion that mimicked the symptoms of a herpes infection, the report said.

The report warned doctors to always ask about the cause of a possible trauma to the eye, even if the symptoms seemed to clearly indicate a common infection.

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