Doctors at a hospital in Iraq recently conducted a complicated operation to extract a mysterious foreign body from the coccyx of a woman who had been paraplegic for two years.

Iraqi media recently reported the intriguing case of a 50-year-old woman who had been paraplegic for two years and recently found out that she had a mysterious foreign object lodged in her coccyx. Doctors from the Internal Medicine Department for Women at Al-Khalis General Hospital, in Al-Khalis conducted a series of tests, including X-rays, on the unnamed woman and noticed something odd in the coccyx area. There was a long foreign body that seemed to have penetrated her spine, so she was scheduled for emergency surgery.

At the end of a complicated operation, Dr. Saleh Abdul-Mahdi Al-Saadi and his team extracted a wand-like lacquered wooden fragment from the woman’s body. The media described it as a “cleaning stick” (at least according to Google Translate), but to me, it looks more like a splintered decorative element.

The operation was reportedly a success, and the 50-year-old woman is now recovering at Al-Khalis General Hospital under the careful supervision of the staff. However, apart from a couple of photos, no other information on the object or how it ended up in the patient’s body, has been offered.

Although it is implied that this stick caused the woman’s paraplegia, no details have been given on the origins of the foreign object, or why it was ignored for at least two years.