A 33-year-old Chinese man from Hunan Province suddenly experienced severe abdominal pain. His face turned pale, sweat covered his forehead, and he rushed to the emergency room of the university hospital in the city. He had no idea that in the coming hours, doctors would discover something that wasn’t even on the list of reasonable possibilities: A live eel about 30 cm long was swimming inside his body.
According to local media reports, the doctors immediately realized this was a serious case. The man's abdomen was as rigid as a wooden board – a worrying sign that could indicate peritonitis, a deadly infection of the abdominal lining. A CT scan performed immediately on-site revealed the surprise: Something—unclear at that moment—had penetrated through the man’s colon and reached the abdominal cavity.
What made the situation even more complicated was the fact that the man had eaten a large bowl of noodles less than an hour before arriving. The implication? He could not be sedated quickly due to the risk of gastric contents being aspirated into the lungs—a dangerous phenomenon that can cause choking, pneumonia, or even death. In the end, it was decided to perform an emergency laparoscopic surgery—a minimally invasive procedure in which surgical instruments are inserted through small incisions in the abdomen, allowing internal access while minimizing the risk of further trauma.
The laparoscopic camera that entered the body revealed an unbelievable sight: In the abdominal cavity, between the stomach and liver, a live eel was swimming, writhing, alive and breathing. The creature, later identified as a swamp eel of the species Monopterus albus, a common species in lakes and rice fields in China, had penetrated through the intestinal wall and completely exited it, swimming in murky and contaminated fluids.
The area was heavily contaminated with intestinal fluids and bacteria, and the risk of systemic infection was real.
The surgeons acted quickly but cautiously. Using a tong-like tool, they captured the eel and extracted it whole, to avoid causing additional tears. They then stitched the hole in the intestine and washed the abdominal cavity with sterile saline solution to minimize the risk of a deadly infection.
Thanks to the team's quick work, the surgery was successful, and the man was released after a few days of observation in stable condition.
Later, the doctors issued a clear warning: The wall of the human intestine is a very delicate tissue, incapable of withstanding the penetration of foreign objects. The insertion of objects or animals through the rectum, for any reason, can cause tears, severe internal bleeding, and life-threatening infections.
Cases of this kind, the doctors emphasized, are always considered medical emergencies even if the patient “feels fine for now.”
So how did it get in there?
The doctors may have preferred not to ask, but others had no hesitation in speculating. The answers online ranged from cynical—“Of course we know how it got in,” one user wrote, “He probably just sat on it by accident,” wrote another—to a more critical and realistic look. Some users explained that in recent years, similar cases have been reported in Asia, in which men arrived at emergency rooms after inserting live eels into their bodies. In some cases, it was an attempt to use a “folk remedy”—an unscientific belief that an eel can help with digestive problems. In other cases, doctors estimated, the motive was sexual gratification.
Either way, the conclusion is clear: The body is not an aquarium, and an eel—even if it looks slick and harmless—is not a legitimate medical device. Not from the outside, and not from the inside.