Because of the hairball, the 8-year-old girl had trouble eating and used to vomit after almost every meal

Apr 8, 2015 14:58 GMT  ·  By

Doctors in China's Henan Province were left speechless when they realized that what was stopping an 8-year-old girl from keeping down her meals was a ginormous hairball that was stuck inside her stomach. 

To remove the hairball, they had to operate on her. Once pulled from the 8-year-old's body, the hairball was weighed and was found to tip the scale at a 2 kilograms (about 4.4 pounds).

According to the girl's father, she had been feeling ill for quite a while when he and his wife finally decided that it would be best to have her see a doctor.

The first medical expert who examined her found a lump in her abdomen, but based on just a CT scan, they found it impossible to say what this lump was and what it was doing in the girl's stomach.

It was only when they cut her open that surgeons realized that what was troubling her was a huge hairball. Now that the hairball has been removed from her body, the girl feels much better. Her doctors expect her to make a full recovery.

Apparently, the reason the 8-year-old ended up with a hairball blocking her stomach was that she was in the habit of chewing on her hair when distressed, DM reports.

Some time ago, in September 2014, an even bigger hairball weighing an astounding 4 kilograms (9 pounds) was recovered from the stomach of an 18-year-old girl in Kyrgyzstan, a country in Central Asia.