Rarely: The man who eats “everything”.

06/10/2020 08:20

Male patient, 55 years old was hospitalized with the diagnosis of gastric esophageal foreign bodies. Surprisingly, doctors have removed lighter with gas inside, big stone, nylon bags, fiddle-leaf fig seeds …

 

Viet Duc University Hospital (Hanoi) recently received a rare case due to dense foreign bodies for a long time. This is a 55-year-old male patient transferred by the provincial hospital with risk of esophageal perforation. 

 

The patient has a history of schizophrenia, a special family background, with a brother who is a martyr, but now lives with relatives because his parents passed away for long time.

 

A year ago, patient had also eaten oddities and operated for removal at provincial hospital. Recently, relatives notice patient does not eat, have pain in the neck area so they took him for examination.

 

At the provincial hospital, doctors identified a razor blade positioning horizontally at lower throat, beginning of esophagus. Due to the risk of esophageal perforation that could lead to dangerous complications, the hospital referred patient to Viet Duc University Hospital. 

 

The duty team conducted emergency scanning to get the whole razor blade stuck into posterior pharyngeal wall. Endoscopic is astonished to find that numerous other oddities remain and cannot be removed through the conventional endoscopy . 

 

 

Ass. Prof. Nguyen Duc Chinh, MD, PhD, Chief of Septic Surgery and Wound Care Department, Viet Duc University Hospital, the person who directly operated for the patient said, through endoscopic images, doctors have imaged “objects” inside patient’s stomach but did not expect there are so many and huge like that. When opening patient’s stomach, there are many different lumps of oddities in it, feeling like groping for forgotten items in the sea.

 

“One by one, each of foreign body blocks was removed out of patient body, it is either a lighter, a rock, a stone, nylon bags, or even fiddle-leaf fig seeds …, most of them are black as it stayed for so long inside the stomach. It took us hours to finally remove from his stomach”, Ass. Prof. Chinh shared.

 

Doctors still unable to understand how did patient swallow these objects through the throat to stomach and leave it for such a long time like that.

 

 

According to Ass. Prof. Chinh, patient is a person with schizophrenia; therefore, doctor will advise the family about treatment and management of patient in the future, to avoid unfortunate consequences that may occur if patient swallows dangerous objects.

 

From this case, doctors remembered the history of a 5-year-old girl in Quang Ninh who ate her own hair also. That child hospitalized in a state of near bald head, abdominal pain, vomiting. Doctors have surgery to remove a bun of hair curled in the stomach, the cause of child eating poorly and frequent stomach pain.

 

Children with “cloudy hair” syndrome or Rapunzel syndrome are common in girls with psychological disorders, pulling their hair and swallowing it in the stomach. Rapunzel syndrome was first noted and reported in international health literature by Dr. Vaughan in 1968.

 

People with this syndrome often eat their own hair or others, even dolls, causing hair to become tangled and trapped in the stomach, intestines, causing long-term obstruction and perforation.