A man suffering from stomach pains went under the knife - to remove a 9-inch plastic dinner fork that had been in his stomach more than a decade.
Lee Gardner, 40, had been leaning on a chair playing with the fork in his mouth when he gagged and accidentally swallowed it.
He was told the disposable cutlery would 'pass through naturally' so he forgot about it until he was admitted to Barnsley Hospital vomiting blood.
Lee said: "The advice when I swallowed it from the doctor was that it would just pass through my system and as that was so many years before I really didn't think it could be the fork."
Medics had to operate to remove the fork. Consultant general surgeon, Hanis Shiwani said Lee was lucky.
"If it had been a metal fork, or had got stuck in the gullet it would have caused more damage earlier."
Read the full remarkable story in today's Chronicle.
© 2013 Barnsley Chronicle Ltd
Urrggghhh!!! Not the best thing to read first thing on a morning but i would like to know how on earth you manage to swallow a plastic fork?? Iv heard some strange things but this is by far the strangest lol :)
It's usually dogs which are prone to swallowing daft things. This is the first time I've read about it happening to a person. I would also have thought that, over all those years, he would have felt some level of discomfort.
says it all really about the intelligence of GP's giving out bogus information like this. stomach acids break down natural foods and liquids with enzymes. we are taught this at school. yet a trained GP who you would think would have a higher intellect would know this, fails to spot that a plastic fork moulded in a factory created with crude oil might prove a problem for stomach enzymes to break down.
once again, another reason to avoid GP's. i bet they would have just prescribed him something pointless like painkillers insisting they are the super drug like they usually do