Doctor easily identifies why man threw up for 4 hours straight (Photo)
Prisoner had to undergo surgery to remove a ‘foreign object’ from his stomach. After vomiting for four hours, a 29-year-old prisoner known to have social and psychiatric problems was rushed to the emergency room at he hospital. Six hours prior to the hospital visit, the man told staff he had swallowed a cellphone. A chest X-ray revealed that the phone was located just above the stomach. This was the first reported case of an adult swallowing a cellphone that ended up in his stomach.
Doctors waited 18 hours to see if the phone would move down, through the rest of his digestive system, but it remained in the same spot (See Photo). Doctors initially tried to remove the phone through a gastrointestinal endoscopy, which is commonly performed to remove swallowed objects that have not passed into the digestive system, as noted by CBS. An endoscope, a thin, flexible tube with a video camera and a light, was inserted to locate the phone and potentially drag it out through the esophagus.
However, despite using various medical tools, the team was unable to properly align the phone without possibly damaging the esophagus. Therefore, the doctors were required to make an incision into his stomach to remove the phone. This procedure, known as a laparotomy, is used in less than one percent of people who swallow a foreign object.
Most cases of a similar nature tend to resolve themselves throughout conservative management or endoscopy, as stated by the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports. The prisoner was discharged from the hospital a week after the surgery, and was symptom-free four months after the incident, per reports.