9 Craziest Things Doctors Removed From Patients

1. Surgeons at Guanji Hospital, in Hezhou, China, recently spent six hours removing over 200 stones from a woman's gallbladder and liver, some of them the size of small eggs. The patient, a 45-year-old known only as Ms. Chen, had apparently been experiencing abdominal pain for over a decade. When she first went to a hospital, an examination revealed several stones in her gallbladder and liver as the cause. Doctors advised her to undergo surgery and have them removed, but she was too scared to go under the knife. She only recently went to Guanji Hospital, when the pain became “unbearable.” Dr. Quan Xuwei, one of the surgeons who operated, said that such a large number of stones was unusual, adding that it was probably caused by the woman's eating habits.

2. A 67-year-old woman has had 27 contact lenses removed from one eye. The discovery was made after the woman went to Solihull hospital in the West Midlands for routine cataract surgery. In a report for the British Medical Journal (BMJ), experts from the hospital reported “a bluish foreign body” emerged during the procedure “as a hard mass of 17 contact lenses bound together by mucus." Ten more were found under further examination. The experts wrote: “The patient had worn monthly disposable lenses for 35 years. She had poor vision in the right eye, and deep-set eyes, which might have contributed to the unusually large number of retained foreign bodies.” Rupal Morjaria, a specialist trainee in ophthalmology, told Optometry Today: “None of us have ever seen this before. It was such a large mass. All the 17 contact lenses were stuck together. She was quite shocked. She thought her previous discomfort was just part of old age and dry eye."

3. In 2016, surgeons removed 40 metal knives from a patient who spent two months swallowing them, according to the doctor who led the operation. The unnamed 42-year-old man, who had an "uncontrollable urge" to eat the knives, went to a hospital in Gurdaspur in Northern India after complaining of stomach pain and weakness. Only after an ultrasound revealed a large mass in his stomach, did the man tell doctors he had swallowed knives. Malhotra said they found folded knives, unfolded knives, and rusted and broken knives in the man's stomach. "I'm sorry I let my family down," the father of two said. “I'll be forever thankful to doctors and hospital staff for saving my life.”

4. A woman had to have mushrooms removed from her stomach by surgeons after they began to grow inside her. Doctors shared gruesome footage of the fungi lodged in the 50-year-old woman's gut, some of which had grown to up to 7cm long. The mushrooms became stuck in the woman's stomach as she often reportedly ate cooked dry mushrooms directly without soaking them and didn't chew them properly. She went to the hospital after suffering from stomach ache, and doctors found that the mushrooms had expanded in her stomach and got stuck.

5. A man who put two live pond loaches into his anus went into intensive care after one of the fish swam up into his intestines. The unnamed 45-year-old man, who was drunk at the time of insertion, was rushed to hospital with signs of a high temperature, low blood pressure, and severe stomach pain. According to reports, the man admitted to voluntarily putting two pond loaches into his anus when he was heavily under the influence of alcohol. Doctors in Guangzhou, southern China, managed to remove the fish successfully. One had broken through the bowel wall, which was causing the patient severe abdominal pain. As the two loaches had stayed in the patient's body for over 24 hours, surgeons had to perform an abdominal digital radiography to locate them.

6. Doctors in Chennai, India successfully removed a cockroach from a woman's skull and—guess what, it was alive! Selvi, a domestic worker living in Injambakkam, was fast asleep when she felt an insect crawling inside her nostril. She tried to brush it aside, but it had already gone in. She then went to the clinic where the doctors told her to visit Stanley Medical College Hospital. After the nasal endoscopy, the doctors found the cockroach sitting on the skull between her eyes. The doctors are glad that Selvi turned up at the right time because if the cockroach died, it might have harmed her brain.

7. A teenage girl is finally able to eat properly after doctors removed a hairball the size of a melon from her stomach. Aakansha Kumari had secretly been eating her hair for years, but her parents noticed something was wrong when her weight plummeted to just over two stone. So, doctors carried our an X-ray which revealed a huge mass that was taking up more than 80% of her stomach. Kumari was diagnosed with Rapunzel syndrome, a rare condition in which a hairball (called a trichobezoar) is found in the stomach, with its tail in the colon. Named after the Grimms fairy tale character, it is associated with trichotillomania, where sufferers have an irresistible urge to pull out one's hair, and trichophagia, the compulsive eating of hair.

8. A man lived almost 20 years with a plastic pen cap lodged in one of his lungs after he inhaled it as a child and forgot about it. Doctors found and removed the partially-dissolved cap after the man started coughing up blood and went to the hospital. When they showed it to him, he recalled accidentally inhaling the pointed object when he was a youngster in the 1990s. He suffered fits of coughing throughout his childhood and early 20s but never thought that it was due to the pen cap. His symptoms have since been relieved following surgery.

9. A man in Vietnam was walking around for 18 years with evidence of a cutting-edge medical mistake, a pair of surgical scissors, stuck inside his body. In 2017, doctors removed the scissors from the abdomen of 54-year-old Ma Van Nhat. The tool was discovered during a routine medical check. The six-inch cutting tool was found on the left side of the belly, next to the colon and doctors said it was stuck to his organs. Amazingly, Nhat rarely suffered pain, until recently. He was prescribed ulcer medications on occasion. He believes the scissors found their way into his body in 1998 when he had surgery at Bac Kan Hospital following a traffic crash. The hospital's director, Trinh Thi Luong, is now taking great pains to find out who may have left the scissors inside Nhat.