In a bizarre incident, 61-year-old Raman Lal (name changed) lived with a metallic lock and pendrive in his stomach for a month. What is even more surprising is that the Chembur resident, who is a patient of manic depressive psychosis, did not realise that he had swallowed the two objects last month.
He approached the doctors only after he began feeling an acute pain in his abdomen. They removed the foreign objects from Lal’s body in a 45-minute-long surgery at Joy Hospital on January 2.
“In the 20 years of my career, I have never seen such a case concerning an adult. He doesn’t even remember the incident,” said his endoscopy surgeon, Dr Roy Patanakar.
Patnakar further said that in most cases, patients tend to pass out any foreign bodies without any medical or surgical aid, but this was not possible in this case as both articles got stuck in the patient’s large intestine.
Lal visited the Joy Hospital in the last week of December and was kept under observation for a week, during which period doctors were hoping for spontaneous egestion of the materials.
“After reviewing his x-ray, we went for video colonoscopy and an image intensifier to help identify the metallic objects on a real-time basis,” Dr Patankar said.
Before Lal was discharged on Wednesday, he was referred to a psychiatrist.
“Although depressive psychosis is a major depression and a very common psychiatrist problem, what this patient did is very rare,” senior psychiatrist of LH Hiranandani Hospital Dr Harish Shetty said, adding that memory repression is possible in psychiatric patients.
“Pseudo amnesia is possible. But I feel he should have been referred to the psychiatrist from day one.”
Dr Patankar will be sending this case to medical journal for publication.
