An X-ray showing the cellphone swallowed by the Irish man.
Inteational Joual of Surgery Case Reports
This is going to sound pretty hard to swallow, but a prisoner in Dublin, Ireland, somehow managed to consume a cellphone. And unlike that one time when the dog wolfed down Grandma's diamond earring, doctors couldn't just wait around for it to come out the other end.
A 29-year-old Irish prisoner was taken to Dublin's Adelaide and Meath Hospital after four hours of vomiting, according to the current issue of Inteational Joual of Science Case Reports. He claimed to have swallowed a mobile phone, and the X-ray proved him right. The article notes, kindly, that "he had complex psycho-social issues."
Yes, the first question we all have is: What kind of phone is small enough to be swallowed? It wasn't an iPhone 6 Plus, that's for sure. Did he time-travel back to 1995 and get one of those cute little Nokias we all had back then?
According to Science Alert, it was actually a mini mobile phone, "the Long-CZ, which at just 5.8 cm (2.3 inches) long and less than 2.5 cm (1 inch) wide, is the smallest mobile phone on the market."
It's never said how he acquired a phone in prison, but having watched every episode of "Oz" and "Orange is the New Black," we're just going to assume there's some behind-bars black market for all these things.
Long story short: The phone wasn't moving downward, and its position made it impossible for the doctors to pull it back out the way it came in. The patient agreed to surgery, which was probably the best decision he'd made that day, and the phone was removed with forceps.
The article ends by calling for improvement in endoscopes, the flexible devices that the hospital presumably tried to use to pull the phone out.
"An ingested mobile phone in the stomach may not be amenable for removal using the current endoscopic retrieval devices," the authors write. "Endoscopic removal of mobile phones in the stomach may be challenging."