A 64-year-old Chinese man who felt a strange sensation in his stomach and went to the doctor discovered a 17cm toothbrush had been stuck in his intestines for 52 years.
It took a medical team 80 minutes to remove the rogue implement from his small intestine.
The man, surnamed Yang, said he remembered swallowing it when he was 12 but had been too scared to tell his parents.
He told the South China Morning Post he thought the toothbrush would dissolve on its own.
Hospital doctors removed the implement via endoscopic surgery, saying it was one of the longest items the hospital had taken out of a patient’s digestive system in the past three years.
Under normal circumstances, they said, a toothbrush in the intestines could rotate, press, and puncture the inner tissue. It could cause intestinal perforation and could be fatal.
Yang was fortunate that it was lodged in a crook of the intestine and had barely moved for decades, they added.
Last year, doctors in China’s Sichuan province removed a tube of super glue – that was 15cm long and 2.5cm wide – from inside a woman, who said she accidentally swallowed it and thought her body’s digestive system would deal with it naturally.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
A plastic traffic cone masquerades as bronchial carcinoma
US commission warns about toys’ magnets after children’s deaths
Doctors swallow Lego blocks in ‘the noble tradition of self-experimentation’
Man gives up drinking and instead binges on a kilo of assorted hardware