A man in Vietnam suffered severe internal injuries after a 2-foot eel he inserted into his anus chewed through his intestines, Vietnam News reported.
Vietnamese doctors successfully removed a live eel measuring 2 feet in length from a man’s abdomen after the creature chewed through his intestines. The incident occurred when a 31-year-old Indian national, experiencing severe stomach pain, was rushed to Viet Duc Hospital in Hanoi on July 27, according to the Vietnam News.
Live 2-foot eel chews through man’s intestines after he put it up his anus https://t.co/k4jSQkeg3R pic.twitter.com/1BIUbfoP6j
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The patient had reportedly inserted the eel into his anus earlier that day, an attempt to derive sexual pleasure. An initial X-ray revealed the eel’s skeleton within the patient’s abdomen, prompting immediate emergency surgery, Vietnam News reported. Le Nhat Huy, the vice director of the Department of Colorectal and Perineal Surgery at Viet Duc Hospital, described the ordeal,
“The eel had bitten through the patient’s rectum and colon to escape into the abdominal cavity,” Huy said, Vietnam News reported. (RELATED: Doctors Find ‘Dinner-Plate Sized’ Surgical Device Inside New Zealand Woman’s Abdomen 18 Months After C-Section)
This picture taken on October 25, 2021 shows an eel in a tank at the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency in a suburb of Minamiizu, Shizuoka prefecture. (Photo by BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP via Getty Images)
The team of endoscopy experts and anesthesiologists at the hospital initially tried to retrieve the eel through colonoscopy. However, the approach proved ineffective. As the patient’s discomfort grew, the team had no choice but to opt for surgery. During the operation, doctors found the eel alive, stretching over 25 inches long and about 4 inches in diameter.
The medical team removed the eel and conducted a thorough search for any other foreign objects, the outlet reported. After the removal of the eel, the surgeons also extracted a lemon from the patient’s rectum. Given the severe contamination from fecal matter in the abdominal cavity, the medical team opted to perform a colostomy to block feces from affecting the recently mended tissues.
Huy warned of the dangers of inserting live animals into the body, noting that eels can survive in anaerobic conditions and can aggressively bite through the gastrointestinal tract. “People should never insert live animals through the anus to seek intense sensations due to the unforeseeable consequences,” Huy warned, according to Vietnam News.
