A 30-year-old man entered the emergency room doubled over in pain. He had no fever, no visible injuries, and when asked what had happened, he simply said he didn’t know.
The doctors ordered an X-ray and then a computed tomography scan, and that’s where the explanation no one expected appeared: a 12.7-centimeter fish lodged in his rectum. Not a fish-shaped object. An entire fish, spines included, which had to be removed through surgery.
When he woke up from the operation, the patient offered his version: he had sat on the fish “by accident” and, according to his account, it slid inside his body without him being able to prevent it. The surgeons documented the case as part of the weekly reports of foreign objects that arrive in emergency rooms, where this type of finding, although rare, is not entirely unprecedented.
