When Surjeet Singh arrived at the hospital with severe abdominal pain and little appetite, doctors initially thought he might have a tumor. But a biopsy revealed something completely different: there was metal inside his body.
Singh, a police officer from Amritsar, India, had developed an extremely unusual behavior: he felt the urge to swallow knives.
As he later recounted, the habit began while he was recovering from a traffic accident. Since he could not walk properly and spent a lot of time sitting, he began ingesting the blades.
“It hurt a little”, he explained.
Doctors performed an endoscopy and encountered something that surgeon Jitendra Malhotra described as “rare and surreal”: inside his stomach were metal fragments and knife blades.
Singh thought he had swallowed 28 knives.
But during an operation that lasted approximately five hours, doctors ended up removing 40.
“In my 20 years of practice, I had never seen anything like this”, the surgeon recounted.
After removing all the objects, the medical team performed a full-body scan to make sure no more knives remained inside him. They finally confirmed that they had managed to remove them all and that the operation had been successful.
Singh remained in stable condition.
The X-ray image makes it possible to understand why the case surprised the doctors so much: dozens of metal objects appear accumulated inside his stomach.
The case also highlighted an unusual disorder that can cause a person to feel a compulsive urge to ingest dangerous objects.
And there is one detail that makes the story even more incredible:
Singh arrived at the hospital believing he had 28 knives inside him. The doctors discovered there were 40.