Prisoner swallows cellphone bringing new meaning to Data Stash; device is removed surgically

Ever wonder what your cellphone might taste like? No, nether have we. But a 29-year old prisoner in Dublin, Ireland decided to find out. After vomiting for four hours in prison, the man was taken to Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin. At the hospital he told a skeptical medical staff that he had swallowed a handset, and sure enough X-Rays proved him right.

The doctors decided to wait for the device to work its way out the back door naturally. But instead of nature taking its course, the phone got stuck. The medical team felt that the solution was to do an endoscopy. With this procedure, the patient was administered general anaesthesia, and an attempt to pull out the phone through the patient's mouth using a special tool was attempted. But the phone could not be aligned correctly, and as a result, the endoscopy tool could not safely pullout the phone without risk of damage to the esophagus.

Next stop, the OR. Surgeons made incisions along the abdominal wall, and with forceps, removed the phone from the patient's stomach. After a few days of observation, the prisoner was placed back into police custody and returned to prison. But not before he was psychologically evaluated. We don't know if the phone survived.

International Journal of Surgery Case Reports came to the conclusion that using endoscopy isn't the best way to remove an ingested cellphone. We think the best way to avoid surgery is not to swallow the phone in the first place. By the way, in case you were wondering, the phone that was swallowed was the smallest phone available, the "the Long-CZ." At 2.3-inches long and less than 1-inch wide, the handset was easier to remove than say, the Sony Xperia Z Ultra would have been.


source: ScienceDirect via DailyDot, CNET