A man who suffered a headache for five months discovered that he had chopsticks stuck in his brain after a visit to the hospital.
As reported by Vietnam, VN, an unnamed 35-year-old man told doctors at the Cuba Friendship Hospital in Dong Hoi, Vietnam, on Saturday, Nov. 24 that he had been suffering from intense headaches for the last five months, as well as fluid loss and fluid discharge. Doctors conducted multiple CT scans, which showed that he was suffering from the potentially life-threatening neurological condition tension pneumocephalus, which happens due to an increase in intracranial pressure. Further examination showed a pair of chopsticks had gone up his nose and into his brain.
While the source of the chopsticks initially puzzled the doctors, the unnamed man later recalled he had been in a drunken fight five months earlier when he first noticed the symptoms. He added that he doesn't remember much of the fight, but he did at one point get stabbed in the face with something. Turns out it was chopsticks, which had penetrated his nose and landed in his brain.
The man initially reported to the doctor earlier, but the hospital did not find anything wrong with his nose at the time. They conducted endoscopic surgery and successfully removed the chopsticks through his nose. He is currently in stable condition and awaiting discharge from the hospital.
In other stories of foreign objects where they shouldn't be, a Missouri man recently found a fly buzzing inside a 63-year-old man's intestines during a routine colon screening. Matthew Bechtold, the chief of Gastroenterology at the University of Missouri, said the fly was "not moving on its own or with manipulation with the scope." It was successfully removed from the man's colon and was dead at the time. However, doctors were unsure whether the man consumed the fly or it entered his body through his rectum.
Bechtold added that if entering his body through consumption "upper digestive enzymes and stomach acid would have degraded the fly. However, the fly was intact, making this hypothesis less likely." He added, "If from the bottom, an opening must have been created long enough for the fly to fly undetected into the colon and somehow make its way to the middle part of the colon with no light in a very curvy, large intestine."
