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On March 10, a 45-year-old man in Guangzhou, a region in the southern part of China, went out drinking and ended up getting so drunk, he made potentially the worst decision possible: He decided to put two fish up his anus.
It wasn't a decision prompted by any other people; witnesses all agree that the man had decided to do this to himself and had ultimately done the action to himself.
It's unclear where or how the man got access to these fish, but doctors have since identified the fish as pond loaches. Pond loaches are a common ingredient in Chinese dishes, thought to be filled with high-value nutrients and beneficial for one’s health – if properly consumed.
The reports don’t say what happened to the man that same night, but the next day, he had to be rushed to The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University for treatment. He was running a high fever, his blood pressure was dangerously low, and he had incredibly severe stomach pain.
By that point, the loaches had been in the man’s body for over 24 hours.
At the hospital, surgeons performed an abdominal digital radiography to find where the loaches had gone inside the man’s body. The loaches, once inside the man’s body, had ended up swimming up the man’s digestive tract.
The fish had perforated the man’s intestine and had put him at high risk of going into septic shock from the infection. One of the loaches had remained inside the man’s intestines and was successfully removed. It had been about six inches long.
The second loach proved to harder to find. It had left the man’s intestines, left a wound on the intestinal wall, and had traveled all the way up to the man’s abdomen. The fish had gotten stuck up in the upper left section of the man’s stomach, which is where doctors finally managed to remove it.
“The second fish is four inches long and 0.8 inches wide,” the doctors’ report read. “[The man] could have lost his life if this loach swam further and reached upper organs.”
Thankfully, the man had gotten to the hospital in time and was able to have the fish removed from his system before they caused truly severe damage to his health.
As it is, although the man is now fish-free, he is still in the intensive unit of the hospital for care. Doctors want to make sure the man won’t succumb to the risk of septic infection or shock in the aftermath of his recovery.
If anything can be learned from this man’s harrowing experience in the hospital, it’s to not get so drunk that you make decisions that are worse than calling the wrong person. There could be far more severe consequences down the line.
