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A teenager with two rare conditions ended up in hospital after being killed twice, and she left one large hair balloon lighter behind. Live Science reports on the case from the UK, where a 17-year-old girl showed up at the hospital after her fainting, bruising her face and her head from the resulting fall. According to a case study conducted in BMJ case reports, the teenager also said that she had had stomach pains for five months and that they had gotten worse over the past two weeks. A CT scan showed the patient had a ‘coarsely stretched abdomen’, as well as a tear in the abdominal wall – the result of a trichobezoar (ie a giant hairball) that was 19 centimeters long and burst through. . When doctors operated on her to remove it, they discovered that the hair mass was so large that it formed a shape of the entire abdomen.
It appears that the girl jointly suffered from trichotillomania, a hair disorder that affects between 0.5% and 3% of people, and trichophagia, which affects the eating of hair (between 10% and 30% of those with the former condition also has the latter). Not that the fact that the girl was destined for the ER, as only 1% of men end up with both like this teenager, with hair tangled and trapped in the intestinal tract, an even rarer, sometimes fatal condition called Rapunzel syndrome word. The girl left the hospital a week after the procedure, and the authors of the study described her recovery as ‘unchangeable’: A month later, she was said to be “progressing well with dietary advice” and attending a psychologist, and there was were no signs of complications. (Read more hairball stories.)