20 Creepy Things Found Inside Someone
You’d be amazed what some people have in their bodies. These bizarre but true stories cover everything from foreign bodies to biological to specimens to more than one piece of cutlery. Some are funny, while others are a bit grosser, but it’s a good idea to make sure you’re not eating as you dig into the list of creepy things found inside people’s bodies:
1. A plastic piece of fork was found in a man’s lung in North Carolina. The chunk of cheap cutlery still bore the Wendy’s logo from the trip the man had taken to the fast food establishment and during which he’d apparently eaten so quickly that he didn’t feel (or ignored?) the feeling of a shard of plastic sliding down his gullet. Two years of lung pain later, the fork was removed.
2. An Indian man lived his whole life with a big belly, but sudden pain atage 36 sent him rushing to the hospital, where the doctors opened him up to find a human fetus. It was the mutated body of the man’s twin, which he’d absorbed before birth but which had continued to dwell in his body. It’s a condition known as “fetus in fetu,” which I will let you Google on your lunch break at your peril.
3. Surgical instruments have been left behind in patients on many occasions, but even so, it was a shock for one Pittsburgh man wound up with a 10-inch retractor lodged in his abdomen. Even more worrisome: When the man complained of pains, doctors told him to see a psychiatrist instead of checking their pockets for missing tools.
4. A 10-pound ball of hair was found inside an 18-year-old woman’s stomach, a mass that had caused her to suffer drastic weight loss and vomiting after eating. The cause of the mass was the woman’s own bad habits: She had a habit of chewing on and eating her hair, which gradually accumulated in her gut.
5. A death row inmate in Amarillo was among a group of convicts found in November 2008 to be in possession of contraband cell phones. The inmate’s chosen hiding spot? His rectum. The phone was found thanks to an X-ray scan.
6. In 2008, surgeons in Bangladesh removed a tumor from a 35-year-old man’s abdomen that weighed — wait for it — 95 pounds. The growth was the size of four watermelons and had been growing for at least four years, and had “huge” blood vessels attached.
7. A Japanese man checked into the hospital complaining of stomach pain, and surgeons thought they’d found a tumor in the man’s abdomen. Wrong: It was a surgical towel that had been left inside the man 25 years earlier when he underwent surgery for a minor ulcer. He’d had the cloth inside his body for a quarter century.
8. A new species was discovered when a fanged leech was pulled from the nose of a young girl who was bathing in a river in Peru. Only two inches long, the leech sports a set of large teeth and caused scientists to revise their understanding of the leech family.
9. A Czech woman wound up with a foot-long medical tool in her abdomen that doctors forgot to remove after performing gynecological surgery. Unsurprisingly, she plans to sue.
10. A living worm — like, an actual, living, writhing worm — was found inside her brain. After experiencing swelling and numbness, the woman had an MRI that revealed what looked like a foreign growth on her brain stem, but it turned out to be a tapeworm. The stomach-churning experience came about when the woman at some point ate food that had been tainted with the fecal residue of someone infected with that kind of tapeworm parasite. The moral: Always know where your food comes from. Always.
11. More than 20 cobblestones were found in the stomach of a Chinese woman who, for reasons only known to her, swallowed them after having a fight with her boyfriend. Unable to pass them through her bowels (which would likely be a brutal experience), the woman was steered toward surgery.
12. A chunk of human lung was found in the stomach of a rapper who murdered his roommate and ingested part of her lung in order to promote a hardcore image for himself on behalf of his record label.
13. More than 30 years ago, a Dutch woman went to the hospital complaining of a stomachache, and that’s when doctors found 78 pieces of cutlery inside her. The woman suffered from a personality disorder that caused her to ignore her food at mealtime and instead go right for the silver, though for some reason, she only at the forks and spoons, never the knives. The most obvious line of the entire story: “Doctors in Rotterdam said they had never heard of someone consuming quite so many foreign objects before.” I’d hope not.
14-16. An MSNBC report found that a trio of midwestern women had suffered particularly painful episodes after physical object were left behind in their bodies after various surgeries. One woman had knee surgery but still felt pain: The doctor had left a 2-inch scalpel blade in her leg. Another woman had a breast biopsy but dealt with pain for eight more years: A new mammogram revealed that a broken needle was embedded in her breast. And a third woman was the victim of faulty construction when a metallic blood-clot filter shifted inside her, punctured a vein, and took multiple procedures to successfully remove.
17. Thirty magnets and steel balls were found inside an 8-year-old Indiana girl after she said they “looked like candy” and wolfed them down. (Even if they look like candy, did they taste like it?) The collection of metal led to holes that resembled stab wounds or gunshots in her intestines, requiring surgery.
18. A set of false teeth were found in a woman’s stomach when she complained of pains. Although initially reluctant to divulge how they got there, she eventually admitted she had swallowed her boyfriend’s dentures while experimenting with “a special type of passionate kiss.” No idea what that would even look like, or how hard you’d have to suck to get dentures to pop off, but kudos for trying new things.
19. How’s this for creepy: An Israeli woman swallowed a cockroach as well as the fork she used to try and get it out. The big flew into her mouth as she was cleaning house, and in a panic, she tried to scoop the insect out with a fork but wound up swallowing that, as well. Surgery got the fork out, but the bug had already been digested.
20. An Ethiopian man had 222 metallic objects in his stomach. Two hundred and twenty-two. The collection included nails, door keys, watch batteries, and hair pins. The cause of the weird eating was likely mental illness. Surgeons were able to remove the almost 1.7 pounds of metal from the man’s abdomen.
