Doctors Pulled a 2-Pound Hairball From a Woman’s Stomach

Surgeons successful Ecuador were capable to prevention a 24-year-old pistillate from an particularly hairy situation. Over the people of 45 minutes, they successfully extracted a elephantine wide of hairsbreadth from the woman’s stomach. The hairball had gotten truthful monolithic implicit clip that it could beryllium felt from the outside.

The hair-raising communicative was elaborate by doctors astatine Verdi Cevallos Balda General Hospital. According to their report, the hairsbreadth had go lodged successful the woman’s tummy implicit astatine slightest the past 2 years. It caused her aggravated tummy pain, predominant vomiting, and expanding trouble ingesting nutrient and liquids. By the clip she was seen by doctors astatine Verdi Cevallos, she had experienced important value nonaccomplishment from not eating.

The hairy bezoar extracted from the woman’s stomach. ©Verdi Cevallos Balda General Hospital

The wide that doctors pulled from her tummy was measured to beryllium 16 inches agelong and weighed 2 pounds. The hairsbreadth had gotten truthful ample that it was starting to snake into the woman’s intestines. It’s technically known arsenic a bezoar, a aesculapian word for immoderate wide of overseas worldly that gets trapped successful the body. Bezoars usually hap successful the digestive tract and are often made of swallowed hairsbreadth oregon fiber.

“It was a wide that occupied the full gastric cavity and could adjacent beryllium identified by interaction from the outside,” said pb surgeon Pedro Lovato successful a statement from the infirmary (translated utilizing Google). 

The study doesn’t spell into overmuch item astir wherefore the pistillate swallowed truthful overmuch hair. But according to Lovato, the pistillate was diagnosed with a “psychoemotional” ailment. Hairy bezoars are a known complication of trichophagia, a signifier of disordered eating wherever radical consciousness compelled to swallow their hair. This peculiar complication has besides been nicknamed Rapuznel syndrome, a notation to the long-haired fairy communicative character. Trichophagia is often accompanied by trichotillomania, oregon the compulsion to propulsion retired your ain hair. 

According to the doctors, the country not lone saved the pistillate from life-threatening starvation but was done successful clip to forestall superior injuries to the stomach. The pistillate was discharged from the infirmary and is reportedly receiving broad follow-up care.