Man Ate Toothpick, Which Got Stuck in His Butt for Months
Doctors in Japan say a man's accidental ingestion of a toothpick left him with back and leg pain for months.
BMJ Case Reports covered the strange story, starting with the 67-year-old man first reached out for help when he'd gone two months experiencing pain in his right buttcheek and thigh.
MRI scans of the man's back and backside found that he was having stenosis of the lower back, a condition where the spaces within the spine begins to narrow. Sometimes, stenosis will be treated with drug and physical therapy, but the man's doctors decided to go for surgery.
A pre-op CT scan revealed something that surprised the doctors; a 7-centimeter rod shape in his rectum, that appeared to be a toothpick.
Six days after the find, the man's right leg pain quickly increased, prompting a removal of the toothpick from its dark hiding place.
When the toothpick was removed, the man had immediate relief of pain.
Most of the time when doctors recover a foreign object in someone's rectum, it's because it was put there on purpose. This time, doctors said they believe after the man swallowed the toothpick, the pointy end of it wound up next to one particular branch of nerves in the spinal cord, causing the butt and leg pain.
Doctors said a series of events such as this is “extremely rare."
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