14 DAY TRIAL // Not too long ago, surgeons in Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan, had to operate on a 20-year-old woman who presented to hospital complaining of severe stomach pains.
Having cut open the woman's belly, the doctors in charge of seeing this case through pulled a fountain pen measuring as much as 4 inches (10.16 centimeters) in length from her belly.
The surgeons who operated on the woman explain that, based on her statements and on the state of the pen when it was retrieved, the 20-year-old must have lived about 6 months with this foreign object inside her body before receiving treatment.
Although this is yet to be confirmed, it appears that the woman, identified as Shing Fang, swallowed the pen when she got drunk during a college party. Whether she swallowed it by mistake or on purpose has not been determined and probably never will.
In their case report, Shing Fang's doctors explain that the woman started feeling ill shortly after ingesting the fountain pen. However, since she had no recollection of swallowing the writing implement, she had no idea what was wrong with her.
At one point, the woman started experiencing severe stomach pains and decided to pay a visit to her family doctor. The latter failed to determine the cause of her symptoms, and even put the blame for her inability to hold down food on depression.
According to Daily Mail, it was while performing an endoscopy on the 20-year-old woman that doctors noticed her stomach was home to something that had no business being there. Later on, X-ray scans revealed that the unidentified object was a fountain pen.
It is believed that, had doctors taken any longer to figure out what was causing this student's symptoms and had they performed surgery on her at a later time, Shing Fang might have not survived the experience.
This is because, the more time the fountain pen spent inside the woman's stomach, the more it corroded under the influence of gastric juices in the stomach. Specialists say that, eventually, this phenomenon would have surely caused the woman to develop several life-threatening medical complications.
Now that the pen was removed from her stomach, 20-year-old Shing Fang is expected to make a full recovery. Hopefully, the next time she goes to a party, she will stay clear of pens, pencils, and small books and will instead stick to mainstream but otherwise harmless treats like soda and chips.