In a strange and shocking incident, a 64-year-old man in eastern China discovered that he had left a toothbrush inside his intestine for 52 years. He came to know about it after he started experiencing strange sensations in his stomach. The man is indentified by his surname Yang, is from Anhui province. Yang told the doctors that he swallowed a toothbrush in his childhood and was too afraid to tell his parents.
17 CM Long Brush Stuck Inside Gut:
Recently, Yang started feeling discomfort in his stomach and went to the doctors for check up. In an examination conducted by doctors he discovered that there is a 17 CM object tangled in a section of his small intestine. Surgeons removed it through an 80-minute endoscopic procedure. According to hospital staff, it was one of the longest foreign objects extracted from a patient’s digestive system in the past three years.
Yang told doctors that he accidentally swallowed the toothbrush when he was 12 years old but was too afraid to tell his parents. Believing the brush would dissolve naturally, he never sought medical help and had felt no serious discomfort ever.
Dr Zhou, one of the attending physicians, noted that under normal conditions, such an object could rotate, press, or puncture the intestinal walls—posing serious risks, including potentially fatal internal injuries. Yang had been unusually lucky since the toothbrush had remained lodged in a bend of the intestine and hadn’t moved much over the years.
