By Ben Cost
Warning: Graphic Content
A man suffering from a two-year-long stomachache shocked doctors who discovered the patient had ingested a Home Depot’s worth of household items, ranging from buttons to earphones.
“On carrying out an X-ray, we found lockets, chains, nuts, bolts, earphones, and many other objects inside the stomach,” said Ajmer Singh Kalra, director of the Moga Medicity Hospital in Moga, Punjab, where the human hardware store was treated.
Patient Kuldeep Singh, 35, had reportedly gone to the hospital concerned over his terminal tummy troubles, as well as a high fever.
Medics scanned the problem area, whereupon they made an alarming discovery: Singh had reportedly consumed roughly 60 gewgaws, including lockets, chains, nuts, bolts, earphones, safety pins, magnets, shirt buttons and zips, and many more inedible objects.
Doctors diagnosed the trinket taster with pica, a mental health condition where the sufferer “compulsively swallows items that aren’t food,” per the Cleveland Clinic.
The affliction is most common among young children, pregnant women and people with psychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disabilities or schizophrenia.
According to Jam Press, the patient’s relatives was unaware of the problem.
Unsurprisingly, eating indigestible objects can prove hazardous to one’s health, as was the case with Singh.
“Since he had eaten sharp objects, there were severe wounds in his stomach,” said Kalra, who “decided to operate on him.”
Singh subsequently underwent a three-hour surgery that was presided over by surgeon Anup Handa and gastroenterologist Vishavnoor Kalra.
While the procedure was successful, the patient is still not out of the woods.
“He is still on a ventilator and is critical,” said Kalra.
In an equally peculiar case of pica detailed in July, a London woman spent over $3,800 to sate her clay craving, which began when she became pregnant with her son in 2013.
