A man who went to the hospital complaining of stomach pain found a 6-inch-long razor blade in his abdomen.
The 22-year-old man from Nepal had been stabbed during a fight the previous day and paramedics at a local medical shop stitched up the wound but did not check to see if the blade was still inside him as there were no visual clues that this was the case. .
The next day, the man was admitted to hospital with “mild persistent pain in the left lower quadrant” and no signs of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or constipation. After taking X-rays, doctors discovered that the giant blade was indeed still inside and floating from his right side to his left, without appearing to harm any other internal organs, according to the magazine’s case report. Kurus.
Nepal, A, Rajbhandari A P., et al. 2023.
A stab wound can cause significant blood loss from the body and can puncture and severely damage abdominal viscera. Puncture wounds can also lead to peritonitis (inflammation of the lining of the abdomen) and serious infection.
According to Statista, there were about 88,000 attacks with knives or cutting instruments in the United States in 2021, of which about 1,000 people died.
“Proximity of the blade to vital internal organs in the abdomen may be life-threatening,” the case report states.
The most “wonderful” detail of the case is that not only did the knife remain in the man’s body, but it also passed through his abdomen on the day of the stabbing without causing any additional damage.
Given the location of the stabbing, a small cut on the man’s liver is believed to have been caused during the initial stabbing, rather than the subsequent presence of the knife. Trace amounts of blood and no intestinal contents were found in the patient’s body, indicating that the knife did not cut into the digestive tract and there were no signs of peritonitis.
Nepal, A, Rajbhandari A P., et al. 2023.
“The potential danger of sharp objects moving freely within the abdominal cavity is very high, with a high risk of additional damage to organs and blood vessels,” the authors wrote in the case report.
Few such cases have been documented before. Smaller objects occasionally become lodged in the abdomen, and some of them migrate: A toddler from Peru who swallowed eight needles on a farm found them scattered throughout his body, some of them lodged near his bladder and rectum.
Surgeons removed the knife from the man’s body and he made a rapid recovery and was discharged from hospital just five days later. However, he did not show up for follow-up a week later.
Do you have suggestions for science stories? Weekly newspaper Should be covered? Do you have questions about stabbings? Let us know at science@newsweek.com.
