“What on earth happened while she was asleep?” ... 4-cm steel needle found in 50-year-old woman’s abdomen [Warning Signs]

[Financial News]  Would you notice if a needle worked its way into your body while you were asleep? A hard-to-believe medical case has been reported involving a 4-cm metal needle moving around inside the abdomen of a woman in her 50s as if it owned the place, despite her having no memory of swallowing it or being pricked.
On October 31, the international journal Journal of Surgical Case Reports published a remarkable surgical case encountered by medical staff at John Hunter Hospital in Australia.

A 50-year-old woman living in Australia went to the emergency room with sudden epigastric pain. Her heart rate rose to 130 beats per minute, but blood tests came back normal. The medical team performed an abdominal computed tomography (CT) scan to find the cause and could hardly believe what they saw on the monitor. A thin, elongated 4-cm metal object was lodged in the left side of the woman’s abdominal cavity. It was unmistakably a “sewing needle.”
What surprised the medical team was the patient’s response. The woman said she did not remember swallowing a needle and had never had an accident in which she was badly pierced in the abdomen. With no immediate signs of serious injury, such as bowel perforation or bleeding, the team discharged her for the time being.


The day after her discharge, the woman was brought back to the emergency room when her abdominal pain returned. The repeat X-ray made the medical team anxious: compared with the previous day, the needle had shifted markedly downward inside her abdomen. It was a “time bomb” situation, with a sharp object moving around inside her and on the verge of piercing the bowel wall or a blood vessel.
Only on her second visit did the woman suddenly recall something. She had recently fallen asleep while sewing, and might have rolled over onto the needle while tossing and turning. This gave rise to the bizarre possibility that the 4-cm needle had pierced her skin and entered her abdominal cavity, but that she had been so deeply asleep she did not even feel the excruciating pain.



As the needle continued to move, the medical team decided to perform emergency laparoscopic surgery. But a second twist awaited them in the operating room. There was only a hematoma near the small intestine, while the needle that had shown up clearly on the CT had vanished without a trace.
The medical team came up with the idea of taking real-time X-rays during surgery. A determined chase ensued as they used laparoscopic instruments as reference points and used X-ray images to close in on the needle. At last, the needle emerged from its hiding place in the omentum, the thick fatty tissue covering the large intestine. The abdominal fat layer, which helps keep foreign objects from spreading, had wrapped around the needle in layers, hiding it from view.
Using an electrocautery device, the medical team created an opening and safely extracted the 4-cm steel needle. Fortunately, there was no bowel perforation or damage to any other organs, and the woman was discharged the day after surgery.
The researchers emphasized the importance of surgery to remove foreign objects that enter the body without the patient’s knowledge, saying, “Even a slight change in the position of a long, thin metal object inside the abdominal cavity can cause fatal organ damage.” It was a frightening close call: an ordinary day in which she had simply fallen asleep while sewing nearly became a nightmare that could have cost her life.

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