In Vietnam, surgeons were forced to cut open a man’s abdomen to remove an eel from his intestines, specifically from the thick intestine, and the eel was still alive at that moment!
The 34-year-old Vietnamese man was brought to the hospital complaining of severe abdominal pain and said nothing about having a fish in his intestines.
Only when he was sent for an ultrasound scan did it show that there was a long and narrow foreign object in the large intestine.
Surgeons only learned that it was an eel, and a live one at that, when they began the operation. It turned out that the patient came to the hospital just in time, as the eel had already damaged the intestine, leading to peritonitis – a life-threatening acute inflammation.
The eel that was removed was about 30 cm long. Doctors never found out how it ended up in the patient’s large intestine, as he refused to explain anything.
It is believed that it slipped into the intestines through the anal opening when the man was either experimenting with sexual activities or trying to cure constipation in this way.
In Asia, there are tales that constipation can be cured by introducing a slippery eel into the intestines…
