Story By: Buli Liang, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Doctors have found a 3-inch chopstick buried in a patient’s eye for two months after he came in complaining of trouble sleeping and difficulty opening his mouth.
Picture Credits: AsiaWire
The wooden eating utensil lodged inside Yin Changbing’s face inadvertently locked his mandible, forcing him to live off porridge for eight weeks.
Yin, aged 44, said he tripped and fell during a Chinese New Year dinner in early February, slamming his head into a tub of upright chopsticks on a table.
The native of Lianshui County, which is in China’s Huai’an City in East China’s Jiangsu Province, said: “The chopsticks scattered all over the floor and I began bleeding in the right eye.
“But doctors said I had scratched my eye. They said it was ‘nothing serious’, gave me some anti-inflammatories and then sent me home.”
However, in the two months following, Yin said he barely slept and had trouble opening his mouth – and none of the doctors he visited could diagnose his condition.
“I couldn’t sleep. I would try have a lie-down when I was tired, but for the most part I was sleeping standing up,” he said.
It was not until he visited Lianshui First People’s Hospital that Doctor Zhu Congyan, the facility’s head of ophthalmology, decided to take a closer look.
Shocking CT scans revealed that behind Yin’s seemingly normal right eye was the 8.5-centimetre (3.35-inch) chopstick, which had impaled his eye socket at a downward angle.
The wooden chopstick had somehow avoided damaging his eyeball and was lodged in his face, obstructing his jawbone and preventing him from properly opening his mouth.
Yin said he lost some 20 kilogrammes (44 lbs or 3.1 stone) in the eight weeks since the Chinese New Year celebrations,
Doctor Zhu and his team found and removed the chopstick intact, and Yin is on course for a full recovery.
Doctor Yin said: “He was very lucky. If the chopstick had pierced his eyeball or somewhere else, it could’ve been fatal.
“After discussing several solutions, I decided to anaesthetise him intravenously while cutting into him and carefully removing the chopstick.”
