Woman, 19, battling incontinence gets a CORK removed from her vagina

A teenager needed a cork pulled out of her vagina after it had left her incontinent.

The 19-year-old, from Serbia, sought help after suddenly finding herself not able to control her bladder. 

She confessed to medics that she had shoved the cork, apparently from a bottle of hairspray, in three-and-half-years ago during ‘a state of impaired judgement’ while having sex.

But the woman, who wasn’t named, was so scared of medics’ reactions she did not seek help out of ‘shame and fear of judgement’.

The woman, of Belgrade, also tried removing the cork herself but was unsuccessful.

A 2021 study by The Royal College of Surgeons of England, found the incidence of objects having to be removed from rectums by the NHS is on the rise. Cases were growing particularly quickly among men

Writing in the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, medics said the woman was still experiencing regular periods.

Upon examination, doctors found swollen tissue around the cork lodged inside her vagina.

The date of the incident was not revealed in the case report by medics at University Hospital Center Dr Dragiša Mišović in Belgrade.

The cork was extracted using standard gynecological tools.

But medics then amputated her urethra — the tube through which urine leaves the body — after discovering another complication.

The woman had developed a hole between her bladder and the wall of the vagina — medically known as a vesicovaginal fistula — which was causing urine to leak out of her vagina.

According to the NHS, the opening can form due to difficulties during childbirth, certain kinds of surgery or following radiotherapy.

Some people may also be born with a fistula.

It is unclear whether the hairspray cork was behind the opening.

However, foreign bodies have been known to cause the fistula.  

Doctors in Belgrade treated the fistula by catheterizing the woman, before referring her to the urology department for further diagnosis and treatment.

As well as corks, other objects reportedly recovered from vaginas by medics over the years include plastic aerosol caps, a plastic cup and even a child’s toy.

There are also hundreds of reports of medics retrieving objects stuck in the rectum – with the first case logged in medical literature back in the 16th century.

NHS doctors are no stranger to dealing with similar incidents, with data analysis last year finding about 400 ‘foreign’ objects are pulled from English anuses each year.

This was estimated to cost the taxpayer roughly £340,000 a year for things like drugs for performing procedures, and the manpower of NHS staff.

But the insertion of objects into a rectum, also known as anal play, carries a number of risks.

As well as getting stuck objects, they can also potentially perforate the bowel which can be deadly as material from the digestive tract can spill into other parts of the body, causing an infection.