Pen lodged in woman's stomach for 25 years still writes (PICTURES)
(CBS) An elderly woman was in for a surprise when she went to the hospital with stomach issues - only for doctors to find the cause was none other than a felt-tip pen that had been lodged in her body for decades.
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Equally as shocking? The pen still works after being submerged in stomach acids for 25 years.
The 76-year-old woman went to the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital in the U.K. because of unexplained weight loss and diarrhea. A CT-scan showed that her stomach looked normal - except for a "linear foreign body" that required further examination.
When doctors questioned her, she recalled using a pen decades earlier to check a strange spot on her tonsils, until it slipped out of her hands and she accidentally swallowed it. At the time, doctors took stomach X-rays and found nothing, so they - along with the woman's husband - dismissed the story entirely.
Cut to 25 years later, the woman's new doctors discussed the strange case with other specialists, who eventually recommended she have the pen removed to avoid it from perforating the small intestine.
"I've never seen something stay in there for so long," Dr. Gary Vilke, an emergency physician at the University of California, San Diego Medical Center who was not involved in the woman's care, told ABC News. "The pen must have just been moving around, bouncing around inside her stomach for 25 years. That's pretty unheard of."
The authors of this case report - published in the Dec. 20 issue of the British Medical Journal Case Reports - warn doctors and patients that abdominal X-rays may not be enough to identify swallowed objects.
The other take-home lesson? The authors wrote in the report, "It may be worth believing the patient's account however unlikely it may be."
