The foreign object was discovered during a gastroscopy of a man who complained of severe abdominal pain.
When doctors tried to understand how the lighter reached his stomach, he claimed it all started from a foolish bet with his friends back in the 1990s.
A 67-year-old man from Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, China, suffered from bloating and stomach pain.
At first, he thought it was regular gastritis and ignored the symptoms, but his condition worsened to the point that he could not lie down without experiencing sharp and unbearable pain.
During the gastroscopy, doctors noticed a strange object that looked like a smooth black cube, already worn from the stomach’s acidity.
Attempts to remove it failed repeatedly, so the team postponed the extraction procedure to understand what it was and how it got there.
When asked he remembered to tell them about a bizarre incident from the early 1990s.
During a night of drinking with friends, he had bet that he could swallow a plastic lighter.
He never told his family about it and always assumed the lighter had already passed. In hindsight, he recalled occasional stomach pains but never thought the lighter was the cause.
Following the identification of the foreign object, the medical team examined the best way to remove it.
Surgery was considered too invasive, while a regular endoscopic removal had low chances of success due to the smooth surface.
In the end, the doctors chose a different technique to cover the object with a sort of sheath and only then extract it.
Fortunately, the procedure worked.
Sources familiar with the case stated that the lighter’s outer part was slightly worn by the stomach’s acidity.
Despite this, the lighter was still intact and full of gas.
To the doctors’ surprise, it even worked properly.
The moral? Swallow pride, not lighters.
