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According to a report written in the BMJ Case Reports, doctors recently saw a 38-year-old woman (whose name hasn't been released for privacy) for a persisting stomach problem.
For the past year, the woman had slowly lost her appetite. In the last eight months, she was unable to keep down any food she ate. She would vomit everything back up, and at this point, she'd lost about 15 pounds because she just couldn't eat.
When she finally went to see doctors for her problem, they noticed immediately that her stomach was strangely swollen due to gas and fluid. She was, however, simultaneously suffering from constipation as well as nausea.
The doctors suspected that she had something in her stomach, blocking her digestive system and inhibiting her from consuming food like normal.
After making this assessment, her doctors decided to operate on her stomach to investigate blockage.
That was when they discovered the problem.
She had a 15- by 10-centimeter hairball lodged in her stomach. Another, smaller hairball "tail," four- by three-centimeters in size, was also caught at the top of her small intestine.
Thankfully, her doctors were able to successfully remove both hairballs, and after six days of recovery in the hospital, the woman has been discharged. She will be able to eat a normal diet; her doctors simply advise her to take iron and other supplements to help her body regain nutrition after so many months of being malnourished.
The woman was ultimately diagnosed with "Rapunzel syndrome," a more colloquial name for the anxiety disorder, trichotillomania. This obsessive compulsive disorder has its sufferers pulling out their own hair and eating it. The condition afflicts more women than it does men and more commonly begins in teens and young adults.
Although the woman was deemed physically stable and discharged from the hospital, her doctors have advised her to get psychological therapy to avoid developing Rapunzel syndrome again in the future.
