Doctors Find Live Eel Swimming in Man’s Abdomen

A man in China showed up to the ER, sweating, pale, and clutching his stomach. What doctors found inside him sounded like the gnarliest horror movie ever: a live, one-foot-long eel.

According to Huaihua Daily, the 33-year-old patient arrived at the First Affiliated Hospital of Hunan Medical University with severe abdominal pain. His stomach had gone board-hard, prompting emergency imaging. A CT scan revealed something bizarre, to say the least—an object that appeared to have pierced his intestines and entered his abdominal cavity.

Doctors rushed him into laparoscopic surgery. That’s when they found it. An eel. Alive. Swimming among his organs.

The creature had completely bored through the man’s intestinal wall and entered the abdominal cavity, putting him at risk of deadly peritonitis. Surgeons used a clamp to extract the eel, then stitched the puncture site in the sigmoid colon and flushed the entire area with saline to reduce the chance of infection.

Live Eel Found Swimming in Man’s Abdomen

The patient recovered well and was discharged from the hospital. As for the eel? No one’s mentioning what happened next.

While the medical team remained professional about the case, the internet had other ideas. “Everyone knows how he got in,” one commenter wrote. “He sat on it accidentally,” another guessed. The case itself didn’t explain how the eel entered the man’s body, but eels are known for digging through soft soil and silt. Apparently, intestinal walls aren’t much of a challenge either.

Strangely, this kind of story isn’t unheard of. Past reports out of Asia have surfaced of eels, fish, and other aquatic creatures making their way into places they shouldn’t. Some are accidents. Others are the result of old folk remedies. And I’m sure others are downright questionable. Either way, doctors say the risk of internal infection is severe.

Eels, particularly the swamp- and canal-dwelling kind found in parts of rural China, have an unusual ability to burrow into tight spaces. When combined with a curious or desperate human, that talent can lead to the kind of ER visit most people would never admit to.

In this case, the man recovered fully. But the image of a living eel swimming through someone’s gut will likely stick with hospital staff for a long time. And possibly with the internet too.