Doctors in Missouri got the shock of their lives during a routine colonoscopy when they came across a fully developed fly living in the patient’s traverse colon.

The American Journal of Gastroenterology recently published the bizarre case of a 63-year-old man who had a fly living inside his intestines. The man had shown up for a routine colon cancer screening earlier this year, and doctors at a Missouri hospital conducted a colonoscopy – a procedure where a camera is inserted into the intestines to check for any abnormalities. And that is exactly what the physicians found while exploring the patient’s traverse colon – the area at the top of the large intestine. – an intact fly that had somehow survived the gastric acid and was chilling inside the man’s body.

Photo: Chris Curry/Unsplash

“This case represents a very rare colonoscopic finding,” doctors wrote in the American Journal of Gastroenterology. “It is a mystery how the intact fly found its way to the transverse colon.”

Although no one truly knows how the fly ended up inside the man’s intestines, it is a known fact that fly larvae laid in fruits and vegetables can sometimes survive our stomach acid and then hatch in our intestines. However, the patient had only consumed clear liquids the day before the colonoscopy, as per the doctor’s recommendation. The day before his 24-hour fast, he had eaten pizza and lettuce but did not recall seeing a fly or anything else in his food.

The fly did not move when prodded by the doctors, but photos captured by the camera clearly show that it is intact.