Spoon Removed From Woman’s Intestine, Swallowed While Removing Fish Bone From Throat

A Chinese woman had to undergo surgery to remove a metal spoon that she accidentally swallowed while trying to get rid of a fish bone stuck in her throat.

The woman, identified as Lili, swallowed the 13-centimeter (five-inch) long utensil just before the Qingming Festival (also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day in English, which is a traditional Chinese festival observed by the Han Chinese), April 5, and avoided getting medical help because she thought it was an unnecessary hassle, Daily Mail reported.

Some 10 days later, she started experiencing stomach pain and got admitted to the Shenzhen Nanshan Hospital in Guangdong Sheng province Monday. Doctors at the hospital immediately conducted a check-up and X-ray images showed the shadow of the metal spoon in the patient's duodenum, which is the first part of the small intestine, located between the stomach and the middle part of the small intestine, or jejunum.

They decided to perform an endoscopy on Lili, where a plastic tube with an attached camera is inserted in the patient's body, to remove the spoon. The entire procedure took 10 minutes to complete.

“As the spoon was in a somewhat horizontal position, we carefully adjusted it before pulling it out vertically,” Dr. Sun Tingji of the hospital's endoscopy department, said.

Dr. Cheng Chunsheng explained how the spoon had found its way into the woman’s intestine. “The woman was trying to retrieve a fish bone stuck in her throat when she accidentally lost her grip and swallowed the spoon,” he said, adding that the patient's duodenum experienced some swelling and erosion due to the utensil being made of metal.

This was not the first instance of a spoon being lodged inside someone’s body. In October, doctors at Xinjiang Coal Mine General Hospital in China, removed the metal utensil from the esophagus of a man in his 20s. The man, identified as Zhang, reportedly swallowed the spoon in 2017 after making a bet with his friends and had since experienced no discomfort or pain in his throat. It was not until he was punched in his chest that the spoon became an issue for him, ABC News reported, leading to the need for a surgery a few days later.

Doctors said the spoon was covered in mucus and could have caused a serious infection. It took two hours to remove it from Zhang’s body.