12/03/2025
A 67-year-old man, Mr. Deng, began experiencing severe abdominal bloating and pain about a month ago. At first, he dismissed it as simple gastroenteritis, but when medications, diet changes, and rest did nothing to help — and the pain became unbearable whenever he tried to lie down — he finally rushed to the hospital.
Doctors performed an emergency gastroscopy and discovered something unbelievable:
a smooth, blackened, rectangular object lodged deep in his stomach, so corroded by gastric acid that they couldn’t identify it at first. Attempts to remove it failed because its surface was too slippery to grasp.
When they questioned the patient, Deng suddenly remembered a long-forgotten incident from the early 1990s — a night of heavy drinking with friends, where he swallowed a plastic cigarette lighter on a dare. Embarrassed, he never told anyone and assumed it had left his body naturally.
Little did he know, it had stayed inside him for over 30 years.
After confirming the object was indeed a lighter, doctors had to plan carefully. Surgery was too invasive, and standard endoscopy wasn’t effective because the lighter kept slipping. So the medical team used a unique “condom-like” technique — enclosing the entire object to safely pull it out.
To everyone’s shock, despite three decades of exposure to stomach acid, the lighter still had gas inside — and still worked.
This was possible because lighters are typically made from polypropylene or ABS plastic, materials highly resistant to acid corrosion.
A bizarre reminder: sometimes the things we think we’ve forgotten… are still inside us, literally.
