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.