Barnsley man receives unusual diagnosis

Date: 19/08/2012. Story submitted by: Lynn Hall

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When a Cudworth man was admitted to hospital vomiting blood he was worried what he was going to be told.....and wasn’t expecting the news he received.

For 40-year-old Lee Gardner discovered he had a fork in his tummy!

Doctors at Barnsley Hospital discovered a nine inch long plastic fork in his stomach - something Lee accidentally swallowed over ten years ago.

Lee said: “I can’t believe it – I have never had any problems with my stomach – except once a couple of years ago. I remember thinking I felt like something had lodged when I bent over awkwardly.  But the advice at the time was that it would just pass through my system, and as that was so many years before I really didn’t think it could be the fork.”

The day after arriving at the hospital by ambulance Lee underwent a procedure to look inside his stomach with a camera to investigate what was causing him to vomit.

He said: “While they were looking inside me with the camera that doctor said are you sure you’ve not swallowed anything? I said no but when he asked again – are you sure, I can see prongs of what appears to be a fork? – I remembered accidentally swallowing one years and years ago.”

Mr Shiwani, the consultant surgeon who went on to surgically remove the fork at Barnsley Hospital said: “Swallowing foreign objects is quite common, children do it all the time and more often or not the object passes straight through the system.

“If something does get lodged, then normally a patient would become ill almost immediately. This is why Lee’s case is so uncharacteristic, not just because the object is a fork but because we believe there are only a handful of cases reported like this where a foreign object has been inside someone for such a long time.

“Lee is extremely lucky that the fork hasn’t caused more damage but we are confident he will make a full recovery.”

Additional info

Address: Gawber Road Barnsley South Yorkshire S75 2EP

Tags: Barnsley, Cudworth, hospital, fork, operation