When some doctors in Lithuania were treating a guy with acute stomach pain, they received the shock of their lives. The patient, who has not been identified in the public interest, was admitted to a hospital in the Baltic city of Klaipeda. Doctors in Lithuania had to extract more than a kilogram of nails and screws from this man's stomach after he stopped drinking alcohol and began ingesting metallic objects.
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According to a Guardian report, the physicians were able to effectively remove all the metal objects after a three-hour operation. Fortunately, the man was stable and out of danger after the surgery.
In-depth
Hospital staff couldn't believe the X-rays revealing many metal fragments lodged in his stomach. The objects ranged in size from a few millimetres to ten cm. Following the scans, the physicians discovered that the man had more than a kilogram of nails and screws in his stomach. Over the previous month, he had ingested all the metal objects after he had quit drinking alcohol.
Surgeon Sarunas Dailidenas commented on the case and said:
During the three-hour operation with X-ray control, all foreign bodies, even the smallest ones, in the patient’s stomach were removed.
The hospital also provided the local media a picture of the collected metal from the man’s stomach and Algirdas Slepavicius, head surgeon at Klaipeda Hospital admitted:
We’ve never seen anything like it.
Possible trend?
Unfortunately, this is not the only case in the world of ingesting unlikely objects. A man had to have life-saving surgery in September after swallowing an entire Nokia 3310 phone. The 33-year-old from Pristina, Kosovo, ingested a model from the former Finnish business from the early 2000s. It was the type that became known as the 'brick' phone after it was released in the year 2000.
The phone was 'too large for him to digest,' according to scans and testing, and it was posing a threat to his life due to its acidic battery, which contained toxic chemicals. Luckily for the man, Taljaku's surgery went smoothly, and the phone was retrieved from his stomach.
