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Woman Thought She Had Disease for 6 Years Until DRs Find Heinz Packet During Surgery

By Liz Boselli January 6, 2018 at 3:05pm

Recently, the British Medical Journal featured over 15,000 cases of rather bizarre medical mix-ups.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the journal “has become a repository of the rare, bizarre, life-threatening, mind-boggling patient cases reported by doctors, researchers and other health professionals across the works.”

And the cases are nothing short of interesting. One case told of a smoker whose “carcinoma” turned out to be a toy lodged in his lung.

Others detailed the unusual circumstances of a man who mistook a bottle of nail super glue for eye drops, and of a woman whose lesion on her cornea was actually a piece of glitter from a Christmas card.

But the story that is making its way around the internet is the case of a woman, 41, who was in considerable pain for over six years until doctors uncovered the true cause.

After colonoscopic biopsy, the woman was found to have inflammation like that of a sufferer of Chrohn’s disease.

According to the New York Post, “Typical symptoms include diarrhea, abdominal pain, fatigue, unexplained weight loss and blood and mucus in the feces.”

So for the next six years, the woman lived with her diagnosis and obtained treatment.

However, the woman’s symptoms only worsened over time. And when they symptoms began to near the severest of the disease, she went in for a laparoscopy.

That’s when doctors discovered the true cause of the woman’s pain after moving in on the mass in her intestine.

But rather than a mass, doctors pulled out something largely unexpected from their patient: two pieces of a Heinz packet.

The pieces had been lodged between the woman’s large and small intestine.

And almost immediately after the removal of the packet, her pain and symptoms of Chrohn’s disease completely disappeared.

Even after this discovery, the woman did not remember consuming a meal involving the packet of sauce.

“This case highlights that an inflammatory mass in the small intestine caused by the perforation of ingested foreign body can mimic Crohn’s disease,” the journal report said.

“To our knowledge, this is the first report of a synthetic plastic packaging causing ileo-caecal junctional perforation mimicking Crohn’s disease,” the report continued.

And while this case may have been the first of plastic causing symptoms mimicking Chrohn’s disease, other foreign objects have been reported to do so.

Three other cases found patients with symptoms mimicking the disease, but instead of plastic, they’d ingested toothpicks.

Thank goodness doctors were able to finally locate the cause of her pain. Let this case be a lesson to make sure the next time you have ketchup that the packaging doesn’t end up as part of your meal.

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