In a hospital in Manabi, Ecuador, a huge mass of hair was removed from a woman’s abdomen.
Fortunately, it took the surgical team at Verdi Ceballos Balda General Hospital only 45 minutes to rescue the 24-year-old patient from his hairy situation.
Dr. Pedro Lovato, one of the two surgeons who led the operation, said in a statement on the hospital’s X-feed that the mass was nearly 16 inches high and weighed 2 pounds.
“It was a mass that took up the entire stomach cavity and was identifiable even by external touch,” Lovato said.
According to the medical institution, the hairy mass has grown over the past two years after the woman began eating her own hair.
Two pounds of hair were removed from the abdomen of a 24-year-old female patient during a recent surgery at the Verdi Ceballos Balda General Hospital in Manabi, Ecuador
It took the surgical team just 45 minutes to remove two pounds of hair that had accumulated in the abdomen of a 24-year-old woman in Ecuador
She experienced severe pain and vomiting and had difficulty eating solid and liquid foods.
“She is a patient with a psycho-emotional disorder, so the definitive diagnosis was made through a video endoscopy performed by the gastroenterology service,” Lovato said.
The enormous hair growth reached the first part of the small intestine, the duodenum.
As a result, the woman lost a lot of weight because she could no longer eat food.
Lovato said that “the surgery also prevented other serious stomach injuries.”
The terrifying operation comes nearly four months after doctors in Newcastle, England, removed a six-inch hairball from the abdomen of a seven-year-old girl.
It took doctors five hours to remove the hair, which covered 80 percent of her intestines.
The child had been eating her own hair for five years.
“If they hadn’t seen her when they did that, she wouldn’t be here,” the girl’s mother told the BBC at the time.
