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Doctors in Dublin have opened up about a shocking medical case in which they had to operate on a man who had swallowed his entire cell phone.
According to a write-up in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports, doctors at The Adelaide and Meath Hospital had to operate on a 29-year-old prisoner after a chest X-ray revealed a cell phone in his body.
The man, who had been known to have social and psychiatric issues, was reportedly rushed to the hospital after vomiting for four hours straight.
Although an initial chest X-ray showed that the device had been resting just above the man’s stomach, by eight hours later the cell phone had moved into his stomach.
To retrieve the cell phone, doctors first tried to pull it out of the man’s esophagus by inserting an endoscope—a flexible tube with a light and camera attached—straight into the stomach, but it didn’t work.
As a result of the unique circumstances, surgeons at the hospital were forced to operate with a laparotomy, an incision in the abdomen.
“As the patient was a prisoner, the mobile phone had to be sent as a specimen for forensic examination,” the doctors wrote in the journal.
Fortunately, the man had already recovered by the time the doctors made an appointment with him four months later.
According to the write-up, a laparotomy is required in less than 1 per cent of cases in which a patient has swallowed a foreign object.
