A 33-year-old Chinese man who showed up at the emergency room with severe abdominal pain turned out to have a foot-long live eel in his abdominal cavity.

Yesterday, Chinese newspaper Huaihua Daily reported the unusual case of a Hunan man who showed up at the First Affiliated Hospital of Hunan Medical University with a pale face, sweating profusely, and complaining of stomach pain. A CT scan of the man’s abdomen showed a foreign object that seemed to have pierced his stomach and ended up in his abdominal cavity. The man’s abdomen was already as hard as a board, and fearing a potentially fatal peritonitis, doctors decided to perform laparoscopic emergency surgery. While exploring the man’s abdomen, they were shocked to discover a live eel swimming among his organs.

Photo: Huaihua Daily

During the operation, doctors found that the eel had completely drilled through the intestinal wall and was now “swimming” in the abdominal cavity, which was at risk of becoming infected if not treated immediately. Using a clamp-like instrument, the surgeon managed to grab and remove the eel, then sutured the hole in the sigmoid colon and flushed the abdominal cavity with saline solution to minimize the risk of infection.

After the surgery, the man recovered well and was discharged from the hospital. No word on what happened to the eel…

The eel is a lurking aquatic animal that is accustomed to living in environments with a silt bottom, such as paddy fields, lakes, ponds, streams, and canals. It is known to dig holes in relatively soft soil, so it can easily pierce through a human intestine.

Photo: Unsplash

Although the medical experts involved in this case did not discuss how the eel got into the man’s colon, it wasn’t too difficult for people to deduce…

“Everyone knows how he got in”, one person commented.

“He sat on it accidentally,” someone else wrote.

Interestingly, such cases aren’t as rare as you might think. We wrote about a very similar case just last year.