Doctors have discovered nine nails inside a patients abdomen – and she had to poop them out.
The 20-year-old woman, from New Delhi, India, swallowed the nails with a cup of toilet cleaner in a failed suicide attempt.
The next day she went to A&E with severe stomach pain.
X-rays revealed multiple nails in her stomach and upper abdomen.
Instead of removing the nails in surgery doctors prescribed her psyllium husk, a plant product that acts as a laxative, with water or milk and bananas, according to the BMJ case report.
After 11 days she had pooped out all of the nails without any complications and was discharged from hospital.
But three weeks later she went back to hospital complaining of vomiting and a lack of appetite.
Doctors used an endoscopy – a small rubber tube with a camera that’s inserted down the throat – to see what was going on.
And they discovered she had pyloric stenosis, meaning the muscle in her stomach that holds food in before it is passed into the intestines had been damaged by the nails.
The muscle had become thick enough to block food from passing through the stomach, causing her to be sick every time she ate.
Doctors had to remove the damaged part of the stomach and reattach it to the small intestine.
She was discharged six days later and, at the time the case report was published, had not made any more suicide attempts.
