An Egyptian man had to undergo emergency surgery to have a mobile phone that he had swallowed six months ago removed from his stomach.

In a first-of-its-kind case in Egypt, doctors at the Aswan University Hospital in the city of Aswan performed an operation to remove a small mobile phone that had been inside a man’s intestines for half a year. The patient, an inmate named Mohamed Ismail Mohamed, was brought to the emergency room with severe abdominal pain, and a CT scan revealed that there was a foreign body in his intestines. The man was prepped for surgery, and doctors managed to remove the object which turned out to be a small mobile phone wrapped in plastic foil.

Doctors didn’t remove the plastic film protecting the phone until police arrived, but it was clear what was inside the protective plastic layer. The patient, who is reportedly stable now and eating normally, confirmed that he had swallowed the handheld six months before, as he had done in the past, only this time around it never came out the other end…

Mohamed told doctors that he had swallowed the small mobile phone before, to avoid having to hand it over to the guards in case of a search, but had always excreted it before. He charged it, used it to talk to people on the outside, then he swallowed it again. Only this time, he didn’t poop it out for half a year, but didn’t worry about it too much, instead eating and drinking normally.

The man said he never felt bloated or constipated, but one day he started experiencing severe stomach pain, and that’s when he was taken to the hospital. Doctors said that he exhibited severe inflammation and infection of the intestines, but that things could have been much worse if the phone hadn’t been wrapped in plastic foil.

“The presence of the phone in the abdomen could have caused intestinal obstruction or bloating, and we could have had to remove part of the intestine, but thankfully this did not happen,” one of the doctors who operated on Mohamed told Sky News Arabia.

Swallowing handhelds like the world’s smallest mobile phone is common in prisons all over the world, but I doubt anyone else lived with one in their stomachs for six months…

Among the weirdest things people have swallowed over the years, you might remember the sleepy man who accidentally swallowed his toothbrush, or the guy who somehow swallowed his house keys.