A giant mass of hair was removed from a woman’s stomach at a hospital in Manabí, Ecuador.
Fortunately, it only took the surgical team at the Verdi Ceballos Balda General Hospital 45 minutes to get the 24-year-old patient out of that difficult situation.
Dr. Pedro Lovato, one of two surgeons who conducted the operation, revealed the mass was nearly 16 inches tall and weighed two pounds in a statement posted on the hospital’s Channel X.
“It was a mass that occupied the entire gastric cavity and could even be identified by touch from the outside,” Lovato explained.
The hairy mass, according to the medical center, grew over the past two years after the woman began eating her own hair.
Two pounds of hair were removed from the stomach of a 24-year-old patient during a recent operation at the Verdi Ceballos Balda General Hospital in Manabí, Ecuador
The surgical team only needed 45 minutes to remove two pounds of hair that accumulated in the stomach of a 24-year-old woman in Ecuador
She experienced severe pain and vomiting and had trouble eating solid foods and liquids.
“This is a patient with a psycho-emotional disorder, so the definitive diagnosis was made through a videoendoscopy performed by the gastroenterology department,” Lovato explained.
The massive accumulation of hair reached the first part of the small intestine, known as the duodenum.
This caused the woman to lose a lot of weight because she could not eat.
Lovato said the surgery also prevented further serious stomach injuries.
The ‘horrifying’ surgery comes almost four months after doctors in Newcastle, England, removed a six-inch hairball from the stomach of a seven-year-old girl.
It took doctors five hours to remove the hair that covered 80 percent of his intestine.
The girl had been eating her own food for five years.
“If they hadn’t seen her when they did it, she wouldn’t be here,” the girl’s mother said. BBC At the time.
