10 Craziest Things Found in People’s Bodies

A taste for fine jewelry

A woman had been throwing up after every meal for two months. When she finally went to the doctor’s office, they took an X-ray—and spotted something you don’t expect to find inside a person’s stomach: a 1.5-kilogram mass of metal. There were necklaces, anklets, rings, earrings, watches and 90 coins. Her family said they’d noticed some pieces of jewelry had been mysteriously disappearing from her brother’s store, but they definitely didn’t imagine where they’d eventually find them.

He got his money back

Doctors published a case in the International Journal of Emergency Medicine about a four-year-old boy who accidentally swallowed a large coin—a New Taiwan dollar, to be exact. An X-ray confirmed the boy had swallowed the coin. Hoping to avoid surgery, the doctors prescribed laxatives and kept an eye on the progress of the coin. Almost a month later, the boy passed the dollar without incident.

Yes, you can be too thorough with toothbrushing

Though it seems impossible, a case published in the Journal of Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad reports the story of a man who swallowed a toothbrush. The authors note that this is “a rare foreign body to be ingested accidentally.” (No kidding!) The man was 55 years old and “living a normal life,” though he waited for two weeks after swallowing the toothbrush before he showed up at the emergency room with stomach pain. Surgeons removed the toothbrush, but there’s no mention of how white the patient’s teeth were.

A bizarre use of the appendix

In an article published in the International Journal of Surgical Case Reports, three physicians tell of a man who had swallowed razor blades. Guards brought the 25-year-old prison inmate to the hospital due to pain in his abdomen, and X-rays revealed the razor blades, which was strange enough. Even stranger? The blades had migrated to his appendix—an extremely rare occurrence. And how about this for a weird science fact: Had the blades stayed in his stomach, they would have dissolved on their own!

Keep track of that toothpick

When a 50-year-old man turned up in the ER with urinary tract issues and abdominal pain, doctors tried everything to figure out what was wrong, according to a case report in the German medical journal DMW. They finally gave the man an ultrasound, which is when they spotted a toothpick in the man’s small intestine.

Thank goodness it wasn’t a power tool

In a Danish-language medical journal, physicians reported the case of a 58-year-old man at the ER with a serious abscess in his rear end—which turned out to have been caused by his insertion of a screwdriver into his rectum. The man survived, but had he waited much longer he might not have. These cases present difficulties for doctors and patients, due to taboos surrounding the subject matter.

When fish isn’t so good for you

Fish is healthy and filled with nutrients—the bones, less so. Physicians found a fish bone in a 31-year-old woman’s thyroid gland, according to an article in Case Reports in Medicine. Apparently, a fish bone had gotten stuck in her throat when she was eating, and it had then made its way into her thyroid gland. “Fish bones are not easy to be found as a foreign body,” the doctors observed.

A troubling eating disorder

Surgeons were understandably puzzled when they found ten plastic gloves trapped in the rectum of a 55-year-old intellectually disabled man. As they related in Case Reports in Surgery, it turned out the patient had pica, a disorder that can lead people to crave—and eat—things that aren’t food. “Special considerations must be taken when considering the ingestion of nonfood items in the intellectually disabled population, as these cases may not present classically,” the doctors note.

The mole that moved

New York City dermatologist Joshua Zeichner, MD, had an elderly woman come into the office complaining of a mole on her skin that was changing. When Dr. Zeichner examined her, he realized it wasn’t just changing … It was moving. The “mole” turned out to be a tick that had lodged under her skin, which the doctor promptly removed.

Shell-shocked, literally

Doctors at a hospital in Gloucestershire, in the United Kingdom, were in for a surprise when a man came in with a World War II-era anti-tank shell lodged in his rectum. According to the patient, the two-inch-wide round from his military memorabilia collection had ended up there after he “slipped and fell.” While the explanation was questionable, the risk was real, and a bomb squad was called in to ensure it posed no explosive danger.

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Sources:

• National Library of Medicine: “Foreign body in the abdomen”
• National Library of Medicine: “Accidental Ingestion Of Toothbrush: An Unusual Foreign Body”
• National Library of Medicine: “Ingested razor blades within the appendix: A rare case report”
• National Library of Medicine: “Foreign-Body Ingestion: A Rare Cause of Abdominal Pain”
• National Library of Medicine: “An unusual case of a screwdriver found in rectum”
• National Library of Medicine: “Migratory Fish Bone in the Thyroid Gland: Case Report and Literature Review”
• National Library of Medicine: “Case Report of Foreign Body Stuck in Esophagus with Failure of Endoscopic Management in a Man with a History of Pica”
• National Eating Disorders Association: “Pica”
• Women’s Health: “7 Dermatologists Share The Absolute Craziest Things They’ve Seen On The Job”
• Global News: “1.5-kilogram ball of coins, jewelry removed from woman’s stomach”
• Military Times: “Shell shocked: Bomb squad called after man lodges WWII anti-tank round in rectum”