Women takes ten years to find out she’d swallowed part of her braces

AFTER suffering from pain in her abdomen, a woman turned to doctors for help but what they found during surgery was not what they were expecting.

DOCTORS were baffled when a 30-year-old woman presented herself at hospital with increasingly worsening stomach pains.

According to the BMJ report, her resting heart rate was a little high but other than inflamed tissue on the inner walls of her abdomen there appeared to be no other unusual vital signs.

With no recent surgeries and only briefly suffering pain a few days prior, the medical team assumed the woman was having some kind of a gallbladder attack.

When nothing showed up on the ultrasounds or scans of her gallbladder, bile ducts or liver the Western Australian Doctors at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Nedlands, were perplexed.

The woman’s pain was persisting so they decided to do a CT scan on her abdomen and what they discovered was not what they were expecting.

A metallic-wire shaped foreign body had entangled and lodged itself in her small intestines.

The CT scan revealed the cause of the woman’s pain was due to a foreign object stuck in her small intestine. BMJ case reports.

The woman underwent emergency surgery and the doctors found a 7cm piece of orthodontic wire which had penetrated the woman’s intestines and surrounding tissue.

Yes, orthodontic wire, meaning that at some point more than a decade earlier when this woman had braces she had unknowingly swallowed a piece of them.

Though she was unable to recall ingesting the wire all those years ago she said she could not remember snacking out on any orthodontic mouth gear in recent weeks.

In other words this piece of wire had undoubtedly been chilling, minding its own business somewhere along this lady’s digestive track for the past ten years.

Talia Shepherd, one of the doctors who treated the woman told Popular Science magazine, “The case is so unique because normally if you swallow something like that, it presents earlier.”

Most “inert” objects which are swallowed that successfully make it passed the upper sphincter in your oesophagus, “will pass spontaneously.” No further explanation needed...

Though unusual it does happen; people sometimes accidentally swallow some very, very strange things.

Last May, Live Science published a collection titled, 11 Weird Things People Have Swallowed.

This list contains a slide show of weird and wonderful objects you cannot help but wonder, how.

The colourful group of items range from a pen, to a lighter and perhaps the most curious of them all, even a mobile phone.

At the end of the day, swallowing a piece of your braces makes a lot more sense than swallowing your entire phone.