2023-07-12 12:53:53
Doctors in Singapore were shocked to discover an octopus lodged in a man’s esophagus while performing a gastrointestinal examination to find out the cause of his persistent vomiting problem.
The Singaporean man, who was not named for privacy reasons, realized something was wrong when he started vomiting following eating a meal that included raw octopus.
When he realized he was also having trouble swallowing, the man panicked and quickly decided to visit the emergency room at Tan Tock Sing Hospital. Doctors there did a quick CT scan, which revealed an ultra-dense mass in the man’s esophagus, but they mightn’t be sure what it was without an esophagoscopy, which involves inserting a small, flexible tube with a camera at the end down the person’s throat.
And only then did doctors discover that the man had a whole octopus stuck in his throat, and the doctors who conducted a gastrointestinal examination were stunned when they discovered the legs of the creature stuck in the passage between the man’s esophagus and stomach.
The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute recently shared images from an endoscope camera, showing the eight-tentacled creature stuck in a man’s esophagus, preventing him from swallowing.
At first, the doctors tried the “push technique”, which is usually very successful, but it soon became clear that the octopus wouldn’t go down without a fight, and that excessive pressure might rupture its esophagus. Therefore, they tried to insert the endoscope following the octopus into the stomach, and then readjust it. Then they had to use forceps to grab the sea creature and pull it out of the esophagus
It is not clear why the man swallowed the octopus whole, but fortunately, he recovered well following the gastrointestinal procedure and was released from the hospital two days later.
The habit of eating octopus alive is popular in many countries, especially Asian ones, and scientifically unproven health rumors are woven around it, and often lead to negative results, as its practitioners can end up among one out of six people, on average, who die of suffocation with these organisms every year. The octopuses desperately stick their tentacles into a person’s throat while they swallow, cutting off the air passage completely and asphyxiating them to death.
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