A male drug addict in India lived with a knife lodged in his liver for over a month after swallowing it with a bowl of water. He was reportedly mentally unstable.
During a three-hour-long operation, a team of doctors at Delhi’s premier AIIMS hospital successfully performed a challenging surgery to safely extract the sharp knife from his liver.
Warning: The video is extremely graphic and may offend sensibilities
The 28-year-old man from Haryana state’s Palwal city was a drug addict. He swallowed a 20cm knife after not getting his daily dose of drugs due to the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.
Doctors at the Department of Gastroenterology at Delhi’s AIIMS called it the first such incident at the hospital where a person had swallowed a whole knife and survived for one-and-a-half months with it.
"When we saw the X-ray we were shocked; there was a big knife. That's when he told us what had happened", Dr N.R. Das, who led the team of the doctors in the life-saving surgery, said.
Any mistake during the surgery could have led to the patient bleeding to death, added Dr Das.