Doctors at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin recently dealt with a particularly unlikely case of intestinal obstruction.

Did she try to attack her own health, or even her life? A 66-year-old woman from Ireland recently underwent a rare surgery in which doctors removed 50 AA and AAA batteries from inside her digestive tract after previously consuming them.

As explainedIrish ExaminerAfter the 60-year-old went to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin with stomach pains, an X-ray on the patient revealed the presence of a large number of cylindrical batteries inside her stomach!

46 batteries were extracted from his stomach and 4 from his colon

However, as additional analyzes revealed “no obstruction, perforation, or damage to the structural integrity of the batteries,” the patient was initially treated conservatively, thus avoiding surgery. In the following days, she emptied five piles naturally, but complications later presented themselves.

A week later, the patient began to complain of increasingly severe abdominal pain and loss of appetite, prompting her attending physicians to opt for a surgical solution. So an operation was performed on the sexagenarian, which managed to remove no fewer than 46 piles from her stomach, and four others at the level of the colon “with the help of an anal retractor. A long nail,” according to a medical report cited by local media.

Attempted self-harm?

The patient later recovered uneventfully and was discharged from the hospital, but her case should be subject to medical and psychological follow-up, as she appears to have initially consumed the 55 batteries found on her body for her own use. – Harm. According to the surgeons who operated on her, her gesture would have had more serious consequences “including more severe mucosal lacerations, perforations and obstructions”.

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“Ingestion of cylindrical piles is uncommon, so clear practice guidelines have not been developed,” explains the report, jointly prepared by radiologists and surgeons at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Potential options for treating ingestion of cylindrical piles include conservative management, endoscopic extraction, or surgical extraction. To our knowledge, this case is the most ingested at one time. representing the piles.” A strange record, indeed.

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