After an attempt to cure his constipation by inserting a sizeable live eel into his anus, a man from Xinghua in East China's Jiangsu Province has lived to regret it. Unfortunately for both eels and anuses alike, this is not an isolated incident. The man had become constipated and eschewed (or wasn't aware of) usual medical advice on relieving constipation, opting for the folk remedy of ramming an eel up there and letting it do its thing. Unfortunately, its thing was to travel up his rectum and into his colon, where it bit a hole in the colon wall and made its way into his abdomen. The man was in pain but was "too shy to see the doctor," according to the Global Times. After a day, he finally gave in and sought medical help at a local hospital, where doctors told him he could have lost his life. The unnamed patient was operated on to remove the 20-centimeter (8-inch) eel. Remarkably, the eel had also survived its adventure and was still alive when surgeons pulled it out of him. The lesson about not putting live eels into your anus was learned the hard way. This "folk remedy" has struck others in recent times. In 2017, a man had a 50-centimeter (20-inch) eel removed from his stomach following his own attempt to relieve constipation. In June 2020, a man in his fifties also inserted an Asian swamp eel into his anus, which also entered his abdominal cavity. Following the injury, feces and pus entered the cavity, giving him a severe infection. “Because he had inserted a live eel into himself, the chances of him dying were quite high had he not had surgery in time," his doctor said, according to The Mirror, adding "he inserted it up his anus into his rectum. I suspect it was then that the perforation in his sigmoid colon occurred." Unlike in more recent events, this eel did not survive. Source
