Doctors Remove Brace Wire From Woman's Intestine, Other Weird Surgery Cases

When a 30-year-old woman visited the emergency room of Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Western Australia complaining of increasing abdominal pain, the best guess of the doctors there was it was a bad case of gall stones.

However, a CT scan showed something unexpected and worrisome — a foreign object lodged in the small intestine, and which had punctured its walls.

In the unusual case published Monday in the medical journal BMJ Case Reports, surgery revealed the woman had swallowed a seven-centimeter long dental wire, which had been lodged there for the last 10 years, possibly after breaking off from her orthodontic braces.

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Strangely, the woman, who has not been named, had no recollection of swallowing it, according to a press release on the case.

The wire had pierced the intestine in multiple places, causing what was called a volvulus. According to the International Foundation for Gastrointestinal Disorders, it is a condition in which the intestine twists around itself.

Dr. Talia Shepherd, one of the treating physicians on the case, told CNN: "The chance of swallowing a wire from your braces is very low. There might be a higher chance if you're sedated and undergo a dental procedure. But this is a very unusual case.”

"I think it was probably just sitting there in her stomach the whole time, and then when the small bowel was punctured, that's when the pain started," she added.

The doctors in their report in the BMJ journal concluded from the case that “foreign body ingestion should be considered as a cause of abdominal pain in patients with no other medical or surgical history.”

There have been multiple other cases in which doctors have removed unusual objects from inside a person’s stomach or even body through surgery.

In 2011, during the Afghanistan war, private Channing Moss was ambushed and fired at by Taliban soldiers. One of the several rocket-propelled grenades fired stuck Moss in the abdomen. However, the grenade did not explode, leaving Moss with a live explosive device inside him. He was taken to an army hospital where doctors, aided by bomb disposal experts, conducted surgery and removed the grenade safely.

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In a strange case in Brazil, doctors found 42 needles inside the body of a 2-year-old boy in 2009. According to reports, the needles were penetrated one by one inside the boy's body. One of the doctors in the case, Dr Luiz Cesar Soltoski, said at the time: “We think it could have only been by penetration because we found needles in the lung, the left leg and in different parts of the thorax. It couldn't have been by ingestion." His father later admitted to piercing the needles all over the boy, including in his lungs.

Sanju Bhagat, a 36-year-old farmer from India, was rushed to the hospital in June 1999, after years of complaints of feeling bloated in the stomach and difficulty in breathing. Doctors thought the bulge in his belly was a giant tumor, but they discovered during surgery that Bhagat suffered from a rare condition called fetus in fetu.

This abnormality occurs when a fetus gets trapped inside its twin. Doctors removed the mutated body of Bhagat's twin brother from his stomach.

"To my surprise and horror, I could shake hands with somebody inside," he said. "It was a bit shocking for me," said Dr Ajay Mehta of Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai about the case.