Manu SB had been carrying pain no one could explain for 12 years.
It all began in 2014, in Karunagappally, Kollam district, India. Manu was 32 years old and seven months pregnant with her second child.
The day before, she had felt weak due to low blood pressure, and at her sister-in-law’s wedding, when she became dizzy, she sought support from the first thing she found: a side table with a glass top.
That instinctive gesture left a sharp fragment lodged in her back that no one managed to detect for more than a decade. She went through consultations, treatments, and tests that found nothing.
The pregnancy complicated the examinations, and the injured area was never examined with the necessary precision. Meanwhile, she continued working at the Karunagappally Taluk Supply Office, living with a pain that had become part of her routine.
The answer only came this year, when an ultrasound and imaging studies detected a foreign object lodged in her back.
Surgeons at VPS Lakeshore Hospital in Kochi removed it on Friday: a triangular piece of glass about 3 centimeters long, the same one that had remained hidden since that wedding in 2014.