Doctors pull 100 fish bones out of old man’s anus after incautious meal

Why you should always spit out the bones

Last week, one elderly man found out the hard way why you should never swallow fish bones.

The 63-year-old senior from Sichuan province, given the pseudonym Zhou, had feasted one night on a dinner of boiled carp soup. Because the fish was relatively small, he decided to simply devour it all — including the bones, Chengdu Business Daily reports.

Though the bones hurt him a bit by scraping his esophagus on the way down, that pain was soon gone and Zhou went back to life as usual.

However, the bones did not end up coming out as easily as they had come in. A few days later when he tried to use the bathroom, Zhou felt a severe pain in the butt.

Unable to handle the pain, he got his son to take him to a hospital in Chengdu where a CT scan revealed mysterious, spiky clumps stuck in the man’s rectum. After being questioned by doctors, Zhou revealed his incautious fish feast.

In a tricky two-hour operation, a pair of doctors took turns extracting dozens of fish bones from Zhou’s anus. In total, they pulled out around 100 bones.

And yet, there were a number of tiny bones still lodged inside his rectum. Unable to pull them out for fear of bursting a blood vessel, the doctors were forced to send Zhou home to rest and hope that he would pass them on his own. Telling him to come back in a week if the pain persisted.

Surgeons at the hospital admitted that this operation was a new one for them, explaining that prior to this, the most fish bones they’d had to pull out of a single patient’s butt was only around 10.

[Images via Chengdu Business Daily]