On July 3, news from Gia Dinh People's Hospital said that recently the hospital has continuously received many elderly patients who swallowed foreign objects in food causing serious damage to the digestive tract, including an elderly person who swallowed a large piece of seashell.
Specifically, Mrs. NTN (86 years old, living in Binh Thanh District). Before that, she ate seafood porridge, because she had no teeth, she could only swallow the food without realizing that she had swallowed the shells.
Two days later, on June 28, the old lady had lower abdominal pain, suspected of having digestive disorders, so her family took her to Gia Dinh People's Hospital because they suspected she had digestive disorders. The ultrasound results showed that the old lady had enteritis. The abdominal CT scan to check the cause of the inflammation discovered a foreign object piercing through the old lady's small intestine.
A piece of shell was taken from the old woman's intestines.
Although the old lady had many underlying diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and myocardial ischemia, the surgery could not be delayed in an emergency situation. Because if the foreign object moved down and perforated the large intestine, the feces would spill into the abdominal cavity, causing peritonitis, and the patient would risk death.
The old lady was taken to the operating room, where the doctors from the Department of Gastroenterology performed an endoscopy to explore the location of the foreign object and opened a small path to remove it. The foreign object removed was two pieces of shell measuring up to 5 cm. After the surgery, the old lady's health was stable and she is being closely monitored at the hospital.
Then, on June 30, the Department of Digestive Surgery, Gia Dinh People's Hospital continued to operate on a 60-year-old woman, residing in Ho Chi Minh City, because the patient ate fish and swallowed a fish bone. This piece of bone followed the digestive tract to the abdominal wall and created an abscess.
Similarly, a 60-year-old male patient from Ho Chi Minh City came to Gia Dinh People's Hospital with pain in the left buttock and lower left abdomen. His health condition worsened, with rapid pulse, low blood pressure, and septic shock. During an anal examination, the doctor removed a 3cm long fish bone from his rectum. According to the doctor, if he had arrived at the hospital any later, the risk of death would have been high.
Not only fish bones and shells, Gia Dinh People's Hospital also performs emergency surgery on elderly people with digestive tract injuries caused by duck bones, tea leaves, and medicine blisters. There was a case of an old man with a bamboo toothpick piercing through his stomach and into his liver.
Dr. Mai Phan Tuong Anh, Head of the General Planning Department, Deputy Head of the Department of Digestive Surgery at Gia Dinh People's Hospital, said that it takes about 4 days for food to pass through the digestive tract from the time it is ingested. From the time it is swallowed, the food will remain in the stomach for about 4 hours. The most vulnerable locations for foreign objects to penetrate and get stuck are from the stomach to the small intestine and from the small intestine to the large intestine. If the patient comes to the hospital early, the foreign object can be removed by endoscopy. In later cases, X-rays will be ordered every 6 hours to check the location of the foreign object, monitor and wait for the foreign object to pass through the natural route. However, during the monitoring process, if the foreign object is found to cause damage, perforation, or abscess in the digestive tract, surgery is required to handle it.
To avoid swallowing foreign objects such as shells, fish bones, etc., Dr. Tuong Anh reminds everyone that when eating, for example, fish, you should eat boneless or filleted fish. When eating fruit with seeds, you should cut them horizontally, not vertically, because when you cut them vertically, the seeds will lie parallel to the fruit segments, making them harder to detect than when you cut them horizontally. If there are elderly people or children in the house, in addition to choosing food carefully, you should not cut the blister pack into small pieces to avoid accidentally swallowing the whole blister pack.
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