Doctors at Hanoi’s Viet Duc Hospital recently saved a young man’s life by performing emergency surgery to remove a live eel that had bitten through his intestines and entered his abdominal cavity.

On July 27, a 31-year-old Indian national was brought to the emergency room of Viet Duc Hospital in Hanoi with severe abdominal pain. Through moans and screams of agony, the unnamed man told hospital staff that he had inserted a live eel into his body through his backside shortly before he began experiencing excruciating abdominal pain. The Vietnamese doctors on duty had seen a lot of things in people’s bodies, but a live eel was new, even for them, so they didn’t believe the patient at first. However, X-ray imaging and ultrasound exams showed a horizontal radiopaque skeleton in the man’s abdominal cavity which turned out to be an actual live eel.

The hospital quickly put together a team of endoscopy experts and anaesthesiologists to perform a colonoscopy and remove the foreign body through the man’s rear, but they were unable to reach the slippery marine creature, and with the man’s pain intensifying by the minute, doctors had no choice but to perform surgery on the man’s abdomen. They were shocked to discover a live eel approximately 65cm long and 10cm in circumference.

“The eel had bitten through the patient’s rectum and colon to escape into the abdominal cavity,” Le Nhat Huy, Deputy Director of the Colorectal and Pelvic Floor Surgery Centre at Viet Duc Hospital, told reporters. “Eels can survive in anaerobic conditions for a long time and have the ability to bite through the gastrointestinal tract.”

After removing the eel and a lemon that was blocking the Indian man’s rectum and checking for other foreign bodies, doctors sutured the perforation in his colon and also performed a colostomy to prevent feces from passing through the newly sutured perforation.

As for the reason why the man inserted a live eel into his body, it remains a mystery, but doctors suspect it was to experience “intense sensations”. One thing is for sure, though, he is definitely not the first man to do it. Only a few months ago, we wrote a similar story about a man who had been admitted to the Hai Ha District Medical Center in Quang Ninh Province, Vietnam, with severe abdominal cramps. Doctors there found a live eel that had bitten through his abdomen.