A 14-year-old boy required medical attention after a golf ball was inserted into his anus and the object lodged in his large intestine in Australia.
After failing to get the ball out himself, the young man told his mother what had happened and they went to the emergency room at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
According to the Daily Mail, X-rays on the unit showed the object lodged in the boy’s colon, but without causing pain.
Doctors even used six different tools to remove a golf ball from the teen’s intestines, including a suction cup, medical net, forceps with four holes, and a balloon catheter.
With none proven effective, after two hours of attempts, hospital specialists gave up on manually removing the body and decided to wait for it to come out spontaneously.
However, more X-rays taken the next day showed that the ball remained in the young man’s colon. With the family resisting the new attempts at intervention, the doctors began administering a large amount of laxatives to the boy.
The patient was only able to empty the golf ball after receiving 1 liter of the laxative. He was discharged on the same day, having a good clinical picture in the following hours and no colonic lesion detected.
The case was reported in the Surgical Medical Journal. The golf ball, in particular, is a tricky thing to do in such circumstances, said the doctors in charge.
“The golf ball presents unique technical challenges when attempting to remove it from the colon because of its mechanical properties. These properties include its large size, spherical shape, incompressibility, and the presence of cavities that prevent the vacuum sealant,” the study says.
Professionals advise that, in such cases, when there is no intestinal obstruction, the patient receives laxatives so that the body is expelled on its own.
Finally, the doctors stated that the teen was instructed not to insert any more objects into his rectum in the future.
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