Under circumstances that remain mysterious, a 30-year-old woman recently swallowed a spoon but was luckily saved through an endoscopy process where the spoon was successfully removed.

The patient is suspected to have had mental distress that could have prompted her to have auditory hallucination, a source from University Teaching Hospital of Kigali (CHUK), where she was treated, said.

Apparently, when the hospital received the patient, she was having severe stomach ache and was immediately rushed to the emergency room, just like any other ill patient for diagnosis; that’s when they found a spoon in her stomach.

According to what the patient shared, hallucinations might have caused this bizarre incident.

Hallucination is a state of having a visual and auditory perception commonly bizarre and dreamlike, but with some preservation of consciousness. They happen during sleep or awake, according to experts.

She was hearing voices telling her to swallow a spoon, and by the time she got back to her senses, there was so much pain in her stomach that kept on worsening as days went by. That’s when she decided to go to the hospital.

Treatment process

A consultant Internal Medicine Specialist and Head of Endoscopy Unit at CHUK, Dr Eric Rutaganda, handled the patient’s case.

He had to remove the object (spoon) inside the patient’s stomach, without operation. With assistance from his team, he performed an endoscopy.

An endoscopy is a procedure used in medicine to look inside the body.

A nonsurgical procedure, endoscopy is used to examine a person's digestive tract. Using an endoscope, a flexible tube with a light and camera attached to it, your doctor can view pictures of your digestive tract on a colour TV monitor, according to WebMD.

Dr Rutaganda shared that he had clearly seen the position of the spoon through the endoscopy process and was hence able to pull it out from the stomach successfully.

He added that usually, an endoscopy process doesn’t require a patient to stay at the hospital for follow up, but in this case, the patient had to stay for two days for close follow up from the medics.

The condition has inspired Dr Rutaganda to write a medical journal.

"One of the things that define a doctor is reading and writing. It was my first time to see such an exceptional case, where a patient swallowed an object as big as a spoon. I am doing a case report about it to share with new doctors, and generally those in the same field as mine to prove to them that even such a big object can be removed without operation,” Rutaganda said.

He shared that conditions that could lead people to behave that way include mental issues, accidents or drug overdose and depression among others.