A woman who showed up to an emergency Irish department recently turned out to have swallowed several dozen batteries.
And not the small button type, either – these were AA and AAAs, according to a case report published in the Irish Medical Journal last week.
X-rays of the 66-year-old’s insides revealed she’d swallowed 55 batteries. Luckily, all seemed to be intact with none leaking any of their corrosive insides into her stomach and gut, so doctors decided to just wait and see.
Over the next week she crapped out five of them, but the rest seemed stuck and she was in a growing amount of pain.
“A decision was made to perform a laparotomy,” the report states, using the technical term for cutting the guts open. They found her stomach had become bloated, so cut into it and removed 46 batteries of various brands, including Duracell, Energizer, Polaroid and Panasonic.
Four more, including some of the larger AA batteries were “milked into the rectum” and pulled out her butt using an “anal retractor and long forceps”.
She reportedly made an “uneventful recovery” from the “unusual presentation”, which doctors at St Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin described as a self-harm attempt.
“To the best of our knowledge, this case represents the highest reported number of batteries ingested at a single point in time.”
