MEDICAL BAG
Recent cases reveal a bizarre selection of misplaced objects in the human body, from a sucker dart in the nose to a mobile phone in the abdomen...
Dart stuck up nose for 44 years
Steve Easton, 51, of Camberley, Surrey, often had a runny or blocked nose, or a headache, and put it down to hay fever, but his nasal passages are now clear for the first time since he was a small boy, having sneezed out the cause – a mildly decomposed sucker from a toy dart stuck up his left nostril for 44 years. He had no idea it was there until in late March he was sitting at home playing a game on the Internet when the dart tip, the same size as a 1p coin, fired from his nose. He was unable to work out what it was until he phoned his mother Pat, now 77, who knew instantly. He was amazed to learn that his parents had taken him to hospital when he was seven because they thought he had inhaled the dart tip. They had found him playing with his dart gun, and noticed one of the rubber tips was missing. “Steve said he’d swallowed it and there was just one of these darts without a tip,” said his mother. “I took him to the hospital and they X-rayed him and checked everything and they couldn’t find it. In the end they said perhaps it was a mistake. I knew it wasn’t and it’s always worried me and now it has suddenly shot out. It was weird.”
Meanwhile in California, doctors removed a macadamia nut lodged in the nostril of a 37-year-old man for 13 years. Sun, 1 April; telegraph.co.uk, BBC News, 12 May; D.Mail, 13 May 2015.
Misplaced Mobile
A doctor allegedly left his mobile phone in a woman’s abdomen after delivering her baby by cæsarean section. A sub at the Sun couldn’t resist the headline: “It’s For Uterus”. Hanan Mahmoud Abdul Karim, 36, had the successful procedure at a private hospital in Amman, Jordan, on 24 April before going home with her son, who was born weighing 10.5lb (4.8kg). Later, however, her family noticed her stomach vibrating and she began suffering terrible pain, according to her mother, Majeda Abdul Hamid, who claims she took her daughter back to hospital, “but nothing was done for her”.
The story goes that Ms Karim was then rushed to the casualty department of Al Bashir public hospital, where X-rays revealed there was a foreign object in her abdomen. Her mother claims surgeons quickly operated to remove the phone. The case was brought up in the Jordanian parliament, where there were calls for the government to resign as a result of the scandal. Health Ministry spokesman Hatem Al Azrae dismissed Ms Karim’s story as “baseless and fabricated”, but added that the ministry was looking into it.
Surgeons regularly leave foreign objects inside patients, as FT’s medical files attest. It happens “once in every 5,500 to 7,000 surgeries”, according to a Washington Post report in 2014. In 2012 Michael O’Sullivan, 49, received a new liver at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, but was sent home with an A4-sized surgical mat still inside him. It was only discovered after he complained of suffering from a lot of pain following surgery. It was three weeks before a CT scan revealed “something unusual”, which surgeons found to be the silicone mat. Gulf News, via D.Mail, 14 May; Sun, bgr.com, 15 May 2015.
420 kidney stones
A Chinese man called He Dong, 55, underwent a two-hour operation to remove 420 kidney stones at a hospital in Dongyang, in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang. Doctors at the hospital suggested that his tofuheavy diet, and a lack of water, were to blame. “Soy products, especially gypsum tofu, are very high in calcium, the excess of which cannot be excreted from
He was sitting at home when the dart fired from his nose
the body without a sufficient intake of water,” said Dr Wei Yubin. Mr He visited the doctor in May complaining of abdominal pain, and a subsequent CT scan revealed his left kidney was packed full of stones. His tally of 420 stones is a long way off the world record. In 2009, a doctor in India removed 172,155 stones from a patient’s left kidney during a three-hour surgery. BBC News, 8 June; Metro, 9 June 2015.
Lured out with basil
A 17-year old boy from Pozuzo, Peru, had been suffering a painful red swelling round an eye for four weeks when he went to the National Children’s Hospital in Lima. An MRI scan located an inch-long larval worm. This posed a particularly severe risk because it caused swelling near an area from which infections can spread to the brain. The alluring scent of a sprig of basil was used to lure the critter from its bizarre hideout. Once its head poked out, doctors used tweezers to remove it. They believed it was a larva of Dermatobia hominis (human botfly). The unnamed boy suffered no long-term damage. dailymail.co.uk, 4 June; D.Mirror, 5 June 2015.
Heavy metal diet
Complaining of stomach ache, Rajpal Singh went to hospital, where an endoscopy revealed 140 coins, 150 needles and several nuts, bolts and batteries inside him – as well as screws, nails and magnets. Singh, 34, a farmer from Bathinda in the western Indian state of Punjab, had begun eating metal objects three years earlier. “I used to gulp down coins and metals with fruit juice or milk,” he said. “Due to problems, I slipped into depression and got hooked onto this weird habit. Doctors have told me those sharp objects would have punctured my intestine and I would have eventually died. I feel much more relaxed now. I am never going to do this again.” Dr Gandeep Goyal said: “There are still sharp needles and coins in his stomach. We plan to operate again and remove the remaining objects.” D.Mail, MX News (Sydney), 23 April 2015.