When we have stomach ache, we can usually put it down to the flu or a dodgy kebab, but the reason behind one teenager’s belly rumbles was in layman’s terms absolutely atrocious
This is the vile moment surgeons discovered the cause of a 16-year-old’s stomach ache – a 1kg mass of wood and plastic.
You read that right. A 1kg mass of wood and plastic.
Arjun Sah had a secret addiction to chewing on shreds of plastic and lumps of wood which docs discovered during an endoscopy.
Surgeons operated on the boy twice and extracted 300g of the non-edible materials – and he faces further operations to get rid of the rest, in Bhathinda, Punjab, India.
His father Gurmeet Sah thanked the doctors for saving his son’s life.
He said:
Whenever we spotted him eating rubber, we would stop him from doing so.
But he wouldn’t mend his ways, away from our sight my son continued ingesting these items.
As time passed by he became addicted to this, but never complained of any problem.
We thought the boy has grown up and kicked the habit by himself but that was not the truth.
One and a half years ago, Arjun first complained of stomach pain. Since then he has been suffering from acute stomach ache.
His family took him to several doctors, but nobody could diagnose what was the actual cause of the pain.
Around a week ago, his condition started deteriorating after complaints of breathlessness and Arjun reportedly stopped eating altogether.
His father added:
I have been running from pillar to post to get a proper treatment for my son. But no one could diagnose the actual problem.
I am thankful to the doctors that saved the life of my son.
Doctors suspected the lad had an ulcer when he was rushed to hospital after losing 15kg in seven days and was struggling to breathe earlier this week.
They performed an endoscopy and were amazed to find a knot of plastic and wood particles in his stomach.
Dr Gagandeep Goyal said:
The boy was brought to us in the nick of time.
Any further delayed could have become fatal for the boy.
The doctors found a black solid substance weighing 1kg inside his stomach.
The knot was had blocked his intestine in such a way that even a drop of water couldn’t pass though it.
We will need to perform three more surgeries on him to extract the remaining 700g of waste from inside his body.
After the surgical procedures are over, he would require proper counselling to get rid of this habit.
When I was in primary school, around the turn of the millennium, before iPhones and Twitter, the wildest we could get in the classroom was to eat pieces of paper as a replacement for chewing gum.
Hopefully Arjun gets the help he needs to avoid any further invasive surgeries.
