A 54-year-old Vietnamese from a suburb of Hanoi had to consult a doctor at the hospital because the pain in his stomach would not give him any respite for some time. But much to the doctor’s bewilderment, the ultrasound scan he had prescribed exposed the presence of a highly anomalous item in the man’s abdomen, near his colon. The man had to undergo an operation, which lasted 3 hours. The medical team retrieved a 15-cm-long pair of scissors. Of course that situation called for investigation: how did the scissors get there? It came out that the patient had been operated upon 18 years earlier after a car accident, and doctors had then left the unsolicited souvenir behind when they closed him up. Nearly two decades eating, drinking, and spending a “normal life” with such a scary adjunct! Vietnam’s health ministry officials are said to have been searching for the doctors who performed the surgery in Bac Kan province in 1998. To no avail, at the time of publication.
