The Woman Who Swallowed a Fork

All the blogs have been posting the x-rays of the Chinese man who swallowed a pair of scissors. He was using them to clean his teeth. But here at Weird Universe we don't like doing what everyone else is doing. So instead, I present you with a similar case, from 1919, of an Irish woman who swallowed a fork, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine:

This Irish girl, a domestic servant, aged 25, had been in England only a week when this happened, last Christmas Day. She had recently lost most of her upper teeth, and had not yet had a plate put in, so her powers of mastication were very poor. After eating a portion of giblets she was seized with a violent feeling of indigestion and she vomited, and the undigested portion came up and stuck in her throat, leading to some dyspnoea. She therefore hastily seized the nearest object, which was this fork, and, holding it by the prongs, she pushed the handle behind her tongue and down her throat. She succeeded in moving the piece of meat and withdrew the fork, but as she felt it was still sticking in her gullet, she proceeded to try the same moneouvre a second time, and this time she got the fork, according to her own description, a long way down. Then, to her surprise, the handle of the fork was seized by an "unseen power" -- probably the constrictor muscles -- and having only a slimy hold on the fork, she lost grip of it and it went down. She went to the hospital on Christmas afternoon, where her story was received with diffidence.

Unfortunately, the X-ray department was not working on that day, and it was two days before a plate could be got to prove that she had swallowed a fork. The plate shows the fork in the stomach, with the handle resting near the pylorus, and the prongs towards the cardia. I operated upon her fifty-four hours after she swallowed the fork, making a small incisiion in the epigastric region to the right of the mid-line, and making a ¾ in. incision in the anterior wall of the stomach, near the pylorus, I seized the prongs of the fork and extracted it. The stomach had made an attempt to pass it on: the handle was in the duodenum, and the hilt of the fork in the pylorus, the prongs in the stomach. Suture was done in the ordinary way, and she made a very successful recovery, going out in a fortnight. Later she said she felt no ill-effects and had no indigestion.
     Posted By: Alex - Sat Apr 04, 2009
     Category: Medicine | Surgery





Comments
Alright kiddies, that word there near the end of the 4th line of the article is mastication not masturbation so stop giggling.
Posted by Expat47 in Athens, Greece on 04/04/09 at 11:09 AM
She was eating giblets (Giblets are the edible offal of a fowl, typically including the heart, gizzard, liver, anus, and other visceral organs.) No wonder she got indigestion.
Posted by Nethie on 04/04/09 at 12:53 PM
I got stuck on the anus part of that definition. How do you chew an anus? No, nevermind, I don't want to know :lol:
Posted by Nethie on 04/04/09 at 01:13 PM
There was a young woman who swallowed a fork
I don't know why she swallowed a fork
She swallowed the fork to get the pork
That was stuck in her throat like a tightly packed cork
The fork went free down the hatch like a fly
Turns out after all, she didn't die
Posted by lostinthevalleygirl on 04/04/09 at 05:30 PM
Patty- There're way too many ways to respond to your comment... ^_^
Posted by jswolf19 in Japan on 04/05/09 at 04:06 AM
So the servant was only 25 years old and had already lost most of her upper teeth? Wow! When I watch the all the Hollywood movies set in that time period, everyone has a perfect set of straight white teeth. You mean it really wasn't that way?
Posted by vegas_girl in Vegas Baby!! on 04/05/09 at 06:07 PM
Hi, patty. I just looove reading your comments!
Posted by lostinthevalleygirl on 04/06/09 at 07:00 AM
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