Ever found yourself struggling to take a particularly stubborn vitamin tablet or painkiller?
No matter how many sips of water you try it with, it doesn’t seem to want to go down.
Well… At least one person doesn’t seem to have that problem.
He somehow managed to swallow an entire Nokia 3310 phone – yes, that classic of the early 2000s that you probably played Snake on, if you are old enough to be that cool.
Doctors in Kosovo had to help the unidentified 33-year-old man after the phone had become lodged in his stomach.
It was too large for him to digest, and put his life in danger as corrosive battery acid could have leaked out.
Skender Teljaku, who led the medical team, shared photos on Facebook of the phone after it was removed, as well as X-ray and endoscope images while it was still inside.
He managed to remove the foreign object without cutting into the stomach by taking it out in three pieces with endoscopy.
There were ‘no complications’, he said.
According to local media, the man took himself to hospital in Pristina as he was in pain from swallowing the object.
According to the British Society of Gastroenterology, most foreign bodies people swallow pass spontaneously, but 10–20% of cases require endoscopic removal and up to 1% could require surgical extraction or treatment of a complication.
They said that coins, buttons, plastic items, batteries, and bones were common items that were swallowed when they shouldn’t be.
Nokia 3310 phones were first announced on 1 September 2000, as a successor to the popular 3210.
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