A giant mass of hair was removed from a woman’s stomach at a hospital in Manabi, Ecuador.
Thankfully, it only took the surgical team at Verdi Ceballos Balda General Hospital just 45 minutes to get the 24-year-old patient out of hairy situation.
Dr. Pedro Lovato, one of the two surgeons who led the operation, revealed that the mass had a height of at nearly 16 inches and weighed two pounds in a statement posted on the hospital’s X feed.
‘It was a mass that occupied the entire gastric cavity and could even be identified by touch from the outside,’ Lovato said.
The hairy mass, according to the medical facility, grew over the last two years after the woman began eating her own hair.
Two pounds of hair were removed from the stomach of a 24-year-old female patient during a recent operation at Verdi Ceballos Balda General Hospital in Manabi, Ecuador
The surgical team just needed 45 minutes to remove two pounds of hair that accumulated in the stomach of a 24-year-old woman in Ecuador
She experienced intense pain and vomiting and had problems eating solid and liquid food.
‘She is a patient with a psychoemotional disorder, so the definitive diagnosis was achieved through a video endoscopy performed by the gastroenterology service,’ Lovato said.
The massive hair buildup reached the first part of the small intestine, which is known as the duodenum.
It caused the woman to lose a lot of weight because she was unable to eat food.
Lovato said that ‘the surgery also prevented other serious stomach injuries.’
The ‘hair-raising’ surgery comes just nearly four months after doctors in Newcastle, England, removed a six-inch long hairball from a seven-year-old girl’s stomach.
It took doctors five hours to remove the hair, which was covering 80 percent of her bowel.
The child had been eating her own her for five years.
‘If they hadn’t seen her when they did, she wouldn’t be here,’ the girl’s mother told the BBC at the time.
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