Doctors find mobile phone in stomach of vomiting man

It is one way to make sure you do not misplace your mobile phone. Doctors were amazed to find the gadget wedged in the stomach of a 29-year-old Irish prisoner admitted to hospital after vomiting for four hours and complaining of stomach pains. After attempting to extract the device using endoscopic tools inserted through his […]

It is one way to make sure you do not misplace your mobile phone.
Doctors were amazed to find the gadget wedged in the stomach of a 29-year-old Irish prisoner admitted to hospital after vomiting for four hours and complaining of stomach pains.
After attempting to extract the device using endoscopic tools inserted through his throat under general anaesthetic , surgeons were forced to carry out  major surgery to remove the phone.
The team at Department of Surgery, The Adelaide and Meath Hospital, Dublin, said they had hoped the phone would be passed by the body. But after eighteen hours. X-rays showed that the phone was not budging.
At first they tried to perform an endoscopic removal, whereby a small claw like instrument, attached to a camera is inserted into the throat to try and grasp the foreign object. The devices are usually used to extract coins, keys, magnets and batteries which have been swallowed.
But the surgeons struggled with the alignment and were worried they might tear the lining of the oesophagus when bringing the phone out.
“Following failed attempts at endoscopic removal, using endoscopic snares, graspers, tripod forceps and baskets, the endoscopic approach was abandoned,” said surgeon Obinna Obinwa, writing in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports.
“The mobile phone could not be aligned correctly to allow for a safe retrieval while limiting the potential harm to the oesophagus.”
The mini- mobile phone, a Long-CZ,  is the world’s smallest at just 2.3 inches long, and less than an inch wide. it was removed via an instertion into the top of the stomach, known as a an upper midline laparotomy.   The phone was delivered at the back of the stomach to make sure there was no chance of damaging the opening to the bowel.
“An ingested mobile phone in the stomach may not be amenable for safe removal using the current endoscopic retrieval devices,” the authors conclude.
“Therefore we recommend that all patients undergoing endoscopic removal of a mobile phone should be consented for a laparotomy.”
The patient received counselling and was released from hospital after seven days.
 In August 2013, it was reported that a 19-year-old Brazilian Adriana Andrade swallowed her phone because she was worried her boyfriend would read text messages from another man.
Nero, a Doberman-Great Dane crossbreed from Pretoria, South Africa, also needed an operation after swallowing his owner’s Nokia mobile phone.
And Gena, a 14-year-old crocodile at an aquarium in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, was discovered to have eaten a visitor’s mobile. Staff were only alerted after the animal started ringing.

Culled from telegraph.co.uk