Doctors in Vietnam reported a patient’s horrific experience of having a 2-foot eel chew through his intestines after he reportedly inserted it into his anus. Surgeons were able to save the man’s life and extract the eel, though not without removing part of his colon as well. It’s a bizarre real-world incident that reads like the trailer for the upcoming Alien: Romulus movie.
Viet Duc University Hospital in Hanoi reported the body horror tale late last month. On July 27, a 31-year-old man, originally from India, visited the emergency department with severe abdominal pain. According to the hospital, the man soon admitted that he had willingly stuck a large eel up through his anus.
He was quickly given imaging tests, which confirmed the eel’s presence, and then prepped for a colonoscopy to remove it rectally. But the doctors discovered a complication: The man had also inserted a lemon into his anus, seemingly to ensure that the eel wouldn’t wriggle out the way it came. The man’s pain continued to grow worse, prompting the medical team to perform emergency abdominal surgery to retrieve the eel from the other end.
Once the man was opened up, the team found that the hefty eel (two feet long and about four inches in diameter) had reached his abdominal cavity by biting through his colon. The doctors were able to pull out the eel, pop free the lemon, and close up the gaping hole in the man’s colon without much trouble. But feces had already spilled into the man’s abdominal cavity and to keep more of it from coming out of the sutured wound, doctors decided to remove part of the upper colon as well.
The hospital’s report doesn’t provide the man’s rationale for what he did. But it does note that people—young men in particular—will try to seek sexual sensations from unusual things inserted into the anus. And while this may be the first instance of eel anal insertion ever encountered by the hospital’s doctors, it amazingly isn’t even the first case spotted in the country this year.
Earlier this March, doctors at a different hospital in Vietnam reported removing a 12-inch eel from a man’s abdomen, which had likely also found its way inside through the anus. Doctors in Hong Kong reported another case of butt eels 20 years ago. Le Nhat Huy, deputy director of the Center for Colon and Rectal Surgery at Viet Duc University Hospital, says that eels can live in anaerobic (oxygen-free) conditions for quite a while and can puncture through the digestive tract.
Huy added that under no circumstances should people try to stick eels or any other animals up through their anus, given the unpredictable consequences. To which I say: Absolutely no problem following that advice, doctor!.
