How the heck did THAT get in the appendix? Here are some
more of the most bizarre things ever found by doctors in the human body.
It was only a matter of time, given how many kids were playing with them,
but in 2017 a fidget spinner meant an unexpected trip to the emergency room.
A ten-year-old girl was playing with the noisy toy that was the bane of teachers everywhere
when she realized it had gotten dirty, so she decided to clean it. And naturally, the best
way to do that was to stick it in her mouth and suck it clean while riding home with her mother.
But the bumpy car ride jolted her, and the next thing she knew she had swallowed the metal disk.
She was choking, her mother rushed her to the hospital, and doctors were able to perform
endoscopic surgery and free her esophagus. Fidget spinners faded from the public eye
soon after this incident as worries about the popular toy being a choking hazard increased,
but for most kids, the most likely danger was only going to be a sprained finger or two.
But some people have swallowed more dangerous things.
When a Croatian man went to the hospital for x-rays, doctors discovered something
truly shocking - an intact lighter sitting in his stomach, and it had apparently been sitting there
for a full seventeen months! It all started when he was arrested on suspicion of smuggling drugs,
and decided he really didn’t want to lose his lighter. Naturally, this concerned the doctors
- lighters are full of toxic chemicals, and the stomach acid might cause the device to break down
and leak. After no doubt having a few minutes of confusion at the x-ray, the doctor put the
man under and used a snare-like device to remove the lighter in a minimally-invasive operation.
And there they found out that this crook was smarter than the average smuggler - he had wrapped
the lighter in cellophane, keeping it protected for the duration of its stay in his stomach
and probably saving his life. Not smart enough to just give up on the lighter when arrested, though.
And sometimes, when you stare at the X-ray - it stares back.
These days, certain characters are everywhere - few more than Spongebob Squarepants.
The friendly sponge is on lunchboxes, on T-shirts, and even on theme parks. But he’s not supposed to
be on X-rays - which was why it was all the more surprising when a sixteen-month-old boy’s throat
trouble revealed a familiar face on the x-ray. It was the Bikini Bottom resident, grinning away. But
although the image was more like a horror movie reveal, the actual cause was a lot more mundane -
the boy’s older sister had a Spongebob pendant, and the curious little boy got his hands on it and
promptly swallowed it. Doctors were able to remove the pendant easily, the little boy had a clear
airway once again - but the family likely had a different taste in cartoons after this close call.
Sometimes, getting too active can have its drawbacks.
The Misfit Shine is a popular tool for tracking physical activity, and in South Korea it’s even
common for kids to wear it. One thirteen-year-old girl got a little too into it - wearing it during
running, bicycling, and even swimming. But it was that last one that proved to bring her a little
too much activity. She put the tracker in her mouth to keep it running while she was swimming
laps around the pool - and promptly swallowed it. She rushed to the doctor where they advised
her to let it pass on its own - uncomfortable, but safe - but after more than a day it stayed lodged
exactly where it was. The doctors broke out their trusty endoscope and managed to lasso it out,
removing it the same way it came in. The girl didn’t suffer any serious ill effects,
but most surprisingly, the Misfit Shine was still ticking away! Maybe the producers should
cut an advertisement - takes a licking from stomach acid and keeps on ticking.
But that’s far from the most embarrassing thing people have swallowed.
It might be a teenage rite of passage - two sweethearts are making out,
and one of them accidentally swallows the other one’s gum. Ew! But they’ve got nothing
on these two young-at-heart lovebirds. An elderly couple was kissing passionately,
but the husband had failed to use enough Fixodent on his dentures that morning - and they slipped
off, right into his wife’s mouth, and down her throat. The next thing she knew, she had her
husband’s false teeth in her digestive tract - and a crazy story to explain to the doctor, no doubt.
The curved shape of dentures makes them tricky to remove and prone to getting lodged in dangerous
places, so the doctor opted for surgery. She made a full recovery - but no matter
how much those dentures were washed off, we’re guessing her husband decided to get a new pair.
This one has happened often enough, you’d think Romeos would know better.
Is there any more dramatic way to propose than putting the ring on top of an elegant dessert?
Well, just better hope your sweetheart doesn’t have an overactive sweet tooth - no one wants
her to bite in and wind up having to go for emergency dental surgery. But for one woman
named Kaitlin Whipple, things went from bad to worse - she didn’t even bother to chew.
She swallowed her intended engagement ring whole off the top of her milkshake - and
didn’t even notice until her boyfriend stared in shock. When he tried to warn her,
she laughed it off assuming it was a prank - until he convinced her to get an X-ray,
and there was the ring in her stomach. The small piece of jewelry passed naturally with the help
of a high-fiber diet, and we assume after some thorough scrubbing, the hungry girl’s
boyfriend got down on one knee and proposed - this time without a milkshake in sight.
This next incident happened during a much less pleasant activity.
An Indian dentist was hard at work on a four-year-old boy - a difficult job
in the best of times. And the unfortunate boy was undergoing a lengthy root canal, something that’s
not easy even for adults. So it wasn’t surprising when he suddenly moved his head - but he moved it
at the exact wrong time, and the precise tool used for root canals - called a pro taper file - went
directly down his throat. The sharp tool is so small that the dentist wasn’t even sure if he
had swallowed it - or inhaled it into his lungs, which would be a much bigger problem. But doctors
managed to locate the device within his stomach, and it didn’t seem to be damaging his digestive
tract, so they decided to wait it out and he eventually managed to pass it safely without
surgery being needed. But that didn’t get him out of his return visit to the dentist’s office…
There is no shortage of bizarre things kids swallowed.
A fifteen-month-old girl in Hong Kong was rushed to the hospital after having trouble breathing,
but when the doctors x-rayed her, they couldn’t figure out what the object in her chest was.
The first guess was a hairpin she had taken from her grandmother, but upon looking down her throat
with an endoscope they saw something shocking - literally. Whatever was in her body was capable
of lighting up! It turned out to be an LED bulb - and it was thankfully completely intact,
because a broken light bulb in the human body could be fatal. The girl was okay - for now - but
the doctors had a tricky operation ahead of them to get the light bulb out of her windpipe.
They carefully removed it piece by piece using forceps,
avoiding stretching her airway or causing damage to the lightbulb that could cut the girl’s throat.
But it’s not only the young who wind up with things they shouldn’t have in their stomach.
A 76-year-old woman had been struggling with abdominal issues for a long time,
and now she was rapidly losing weight and having trouble going to the bathroom.
The doctors gave her a CT scan and used a scope and discovered the shocking culprit - a felt-tip
pen lurking in her digestive system. When they asked her how long it had been there,
they got a hard-to-believe response - twenty-five years. When she was only fifty-one, she was trying
to scratch her tonsils with the pen, slipped, and accidentally swallowed it. She tried to
tell doctors and her husband, but they couldn’t find any evidence of the pen - and told her she
must be imagining it. The pen had miraculously stayed intact all these years, never leaking
into her stomach and potentially poisoning her. While her symptoms were relatively minor, doctors
decided to remove the pen - and gave her ammo for the world’s biggest I-told-you-so at home.
But some people wind up in an uncomfortable situation due to bad judgment calls.
When an eighteen-year-old woman went to the hospital to tell her doctors she had swallowed
her toothbrush, they quickly investigated and found a massive eight-inch dental implement
lurking in her stomach. Fortunately, the toothbrush was blunt on both ends
and wasn’t damaging her digestive system, but it did stand the risk of obstructing progress
through there, so the doctors removed it with a scope. She made a full recovery - but it was the
reasoning behind it winding up there that was more troubling. After talking with the doctors,
she confessed that she had a serious eating disorder and had been using the toothbrush to
induce vomiting, and was eventually sent home with a clean bill of health - and likely a referral
for counseling. Her accidental swallowing mishap may have wound up saving her life.
But no one failed a spot check worse than this next guy.
No one likes being in prison. Not only are you locked up, but the odds are they’re going to
confiscate all your stuff. So much for keeping up on your streaming shows, and the odds are
you’re going to lose that argument with Stabby Joe about what to watch on the common room TV.
But one Irish prisoner went a little too far with trying to keep his phone - he swallowed it before
he was taken into custody, no doubt hoping to pass it naturally and then use it in his cell - after a
thorough scrubbing. However, the unfortunate inmate’s digestive system became obstructed
and he had to be taken to the hospital to get it removed. Doctors tried to
use a scope to pull it up through his esophagus, but it kept on getting stuck
and they wound up having to perform stomach surgery to remove it. But hey,
that’s a lengthy recovery period and maybe the hospital had something good on TV.
Those were all bizarre cases - but some happen more often than you’d think.
What’s one of the most dangerous objects to accidentally swallow?
It’s not poison - it’s the humble toothpick. After all, it kind of seems ridiculous that we’re
sticking sharpened pieces of wood in our mouth so often, when even a split-second startle could make
us swallow them. But there are other reasons that toothpicks are so dangerous - their sharp, long
structure means they could easily get stuck in a narrow pathway like the esophagus or intestine
and cause internal bleeding. But they also won’t show up on CT scans or ultrasounds,
because they’re made of wood and don’t register in the same way. That means that when doctors
hear someone’s swallowed a toothpick, the odds are they’re going to go for surgery and
remove it before it makes its way out of the digestive lining the hard way.
But one food iteam is much more dangerous if ingested.
You’re digging your way through a piece of trout, when suddenly it happens - a fish bone stuck in
your throat! It’s only seconds before you’re able to cough it up, but they feel like hours,
and now you really don’t feel like going back to your dinner - but this is probably the luckiest
outcome of swallowing a fish bone. Studies show that fish bones are the most common foreign body
to choke on or swallow in Asia, and they’re particularly dangerous for a few reasons. For
one thing, they’re organic matter and won’t show up easily on scans. They’re also well-hidden,
often pale and thin, and someone can easily swallow one while digging into a relaxing dinner.
But the real problem comes when they actually make their way into the esophagus and beyond.
While beef or pork bones are hard and unlikely to swallow,
fish bones are thin and sharp - and some can be long enough that they can actually
damage the heart from the esophagus if they’re pointing in the wrong direction.
After eating, during eating - even before eating, this item can be dangerousif swallowed.
Cleaning the grill can be a painful experience as you scrub like crazy to get every last bit
of that burned grease out of there before grill season. But make sure you keep your
mouth closed while you do it - especially if you’re using one of those grill brushes
with metal bristles. They’re one of the most common foreign bodies to swallow,
causing almost seventeen hundred emergency room visits between 2002 and 2014. But no one’s
intentionally eating them, right? We hope not - but that doesn’t always protect people. Vigorous
scrubbing can knock some of the bristles loose, especially if the brush has been used many times,
and someone can accidentally inhale the small, sharp bristles without even noticing them. Because
they can easily get stuck in the tissue of the digestive system, it usually takes an
invasive operation to find and remove them - so it might be a good time to switch out your brushes.
But one object is a new arrival - and might pose a bigger danger than any other.
Kids swallow all sorts of things, especially if they’re small and round. Hey, shaped like candy,
must be a candy, right? Toddlers have been swallowing buttons for decades,
and the advice to parents is usually the same - keep an eye out for it to show up in the diaper.
The joys of parenthood, right? But one type of button is a very different story - button
batteries, the type that is used to power many portable devices. These are lithium ion batteries
that are packed with electricity and toxic chemicals, and doctors have advised any parents
whose child swallows one to rush them to the hospital immediately. Not only can these get
stuck and cause choking, but the exposure to liquid can cause electrical and chemical burns.
When a three-year-old swallowed one of these button batteries, he required emergency surgery
and it was several weeks before his throat was completely healed. Doctors estimate that
there’s a two-hour ticking clock to remove the battery before it becomes life-threatening.
But some people have wound up with truly bizarre things in all parts of their bodies.
It’s a rite of passage for kids - you lose a tooth, you put it under your pillow, and the
tooth fairy pays a visit and pays market rate. But what if a kid really wants to keep
their tooth and isn’t taking any payment? One little girl had an uncomfortable way of keeping
her tooth hidden - she stuck it in her ear. Unfortunately, it went in a little too deep,
and she was soon complaining of a serious earache. After her parents weren’t able
to remove it at home, they took her to the doctor - where it was removed using tools,
making it probably the first tooth extraction ever performed on an ear. We wonder if she ever did
wind up getting payment from the tooth fairy. Hopefully she didn’t ask where it had been.
But it’s not the strangest thing found in the ear.
A twelve-year-old boy had ear problems of his own. Not only was he suffering from ear pain
and couldn’t hear properly out of it, but her could swear he felt something moving around
in there. The boy was taken to the doctor, who used a pair of tweezers - and removed a
full-sized moth from his ear canal. Not only that, but the moth was still alive
and tried to fly away. This might have been a case of the moth looking for a
nice place to hide and getting stuck - the ears are not a good vacation home.
The ears are an inviting target - but the eyes are also vulnerable.
A United Kingdom woman came into the doctor for surgery to remove her cataracts, but the
doctors noticed something very strange - she had an odd blue lump on her eye. Was this some sort
of growth? The woman wore contact lenses, but didn’t have any other known health conditions
besides cataracts. The doctors investigated - and were shocked by what they found.
The lump was a collection of contact lenses - twenty-seven in total. The sixty-seven-year-old
woman had just been adding one contact lens onto the others for who knows how well, and they all
became fused together by the mucus in her eyes. The doctors carefully removed them and her eyes
recovered, but the doctors likely shared this story over several stiff drinks that night.
It wasn’t the worst judgment call someone made about putting something in their body.
A twenty-five-year-old prison inmate was brought in with extreme stomach pain,
and doctors investigates with x-rays. They found a collection of razor blades stuck in his body - and
the inmate actually admitted he had swallowed them! Maybe he had tried to use this risky tactic
to get out of prison - and it worked for a time. The inmate wasn’t very smart, but he was extremely
lucky - somehow, the razor blades had all lodged in his appendix, the least necessary organ in
the body. After a routine appendectomy, he was on the mend - and headed right back to the hoosegow.
But one guy took eating things that weren’t food to a whole new level.
Todd Robbins was a traveling entertainer in the 1980s, known for one particularly crazy trick - he
could eat almost anything. While he wasn’t as versatile as the legendary Michael Lotito,
who once ate a whole plane, Robbins had a specialty - he loved to eat lightbulbs. And not
just swallowing them whole like that unfortunate baby - he would crunch into the large lightbulbs
like they were a nice juicy apple. While this could normally result in fatal injuries - as
even a slight piece of glass out of place could cause fatal tears in the digestive tract - Robbins
didn’t have any such problem. The sideshow magician had a mystery technique that allowed
him to eat them safely, in a similar way that sword swallowers avoid damage to their insides,
and he continues to pull off his trademark trick to one day. His insides are as strong as ever, but
his dentist continues to make a killing - Robbins says he occasionally chips teeth on the glass.
And dating back decades, he wasn’t the only person to pull off this crazy trick.
Chaz Chase was a star in the days of vaudeville, where you either sank or swam live on stage. And
Chase had one trick that killed every time - eating cigarettes. Not tasty or healthy,
but it doesn’t seem too harmful - right? Except that before swallowing each cigarette,
Chase would light it and swallow the flame, doing this hundreds or possibly thousands of
times over his long career. When this trick wore a little thin, he stepped up his act - swallowing
flaming cigars live on stage. While he also ate other objects like cardboard and flowers,
nothing killed quite like his fiery act, but it nearly got him into trouble with border
control once. When visiting the land down under, Australian border authorities stopped him - he
was carrying so many cigarettes that they assumed he was a smuggler, not a performer.
But his odd habit didn’t seem to hurt him - Chaz Chase lived to a healthy eighty-two years old.
But no one made a career out of eating things like one man.
Michael Lotito might have been known for eating a plane, but that was by far his only trick.
The man who was known for eating anything became famous for one stunt after another, including
eating a total of eighteen bicycles over the many years of his career. His stomach lining was twice
as thick as the average person, and he kept his throat nice and slippery with a hefty daily
dose of mineral oil. But he had to worry about the impact of this unusual diet on his health,
and as he was getting older he dealt with it the way only he could - eating an entire coffin,
handles and all. Did this make him feel better about his mortality? We don’t know,
but maybe it scared off the grim reaper - because Michael Lotito eventually died of natural causes,
after winning an award for the world’s strangest diet from the Guinness Book of World Records.
But some people took their bad diet habits to the extreme.
When a sixty-two-year-old Frenchman came into the emergency room complaining of stomach pain,
the doctors were shocked to find a huge mass in his stomach. He went under the knife to remove it
and make sure it wasn’t cancer - and the doctors were stunned to find three hundred and fifty coins
in his stomach, making him the closest any human being has ever come to being a piggy bank.
The man had pica, a condition that makes people ingest objects that aren’t actually
food - but few take it to this extreme level. He recovered fully from surgery, was given
the opportunity to seek counseling to get his disorder under control - but more importantly,
he got all his change back, hopefully fully cleaned and with a better place to store it.
But one woman got an unwelcome surprise in her daily snack.
Some people just can’t keep their thoughts to themselves when they see you eating a hot dog.
“How could you eat that! You don’t even know what’s in it!”.
But that turned out to be true for one woman more than average,
because she didn’t just eat some mysterious meat parts. Her Costco hot dog had something hard in
it - that she only noticed when she swallowed it. She soon found another similar object in
the hot dog - and was shocked to discover that it was a bullet. When she went to the doctor,
they advised her that she would pass it naturally and didn’t need surgery. While she recovered
with no ill effects, it left everyone with one lingering question - how do two bullets get into
a hot dog? The best guess is a meat processing mishap, where the animal it came from still had
some stray bullets in that made their way into that delicious mystery meat sausage.
Some people really didn’t think things through before they made a move.
When a man came into the hospital complaining of a stuck candle, doctors weren’t prepared for
what they found - a foot-long candle inserted firmly into the man’s rectum. It turns out
he had been trying to reach his prostate, only for it to get stuck a little too deep
and disappear into his digestive tract. The doctors set out to remove it,
but there was one problem - it was starting to melt. It may not have been afire when he
inserted it - we hope - but with the human body at 98.6 degrees, it was starting to get
soft in a hurry - meaning the doctors had a tricky and sticky procedure ahead of them.
But for bad ideas, nothing tops this last choice.
An ER doctor came home one day with the scariest story he had ever encountered in medicine.
A man had been suffering from painful and itchy hemorrhoids and was seeking anything to relieve
his pain. He found something that literally scratched the itch - an old 50MM bullet that
he had in his firearms collection. But one day, while using the bullet to probe his rear end,
it slipped in a little too deep - and vanished up his rectum. He went to the hospital,
and after x-rays confirmed the bullet, the hospital went into crisis mode.
The bullet was live, and one wrong move could cause the machine-gun-caliber bullet to explode.
An arms team was called in to defuse things and ensure that the doctors were able to
remove the bullet safely, and the victim and doctors eventually made it home safely - after
a far more harrowing day than proctologists were ever taught to expect in medical school.
Want more shocking stories from the medical field? Check out “The World’s Craziest ER
Stories”, or watch this video instead.