Man Ruptures His Stomach After Taking GHB and Shelving 15 Hard-Boiled Eggs

We've all heard our fair share of foreign-object-in-the-arse stories. Everybody knows someone who knows someone who fell on a sauce bottle in the shower and had to be rushed to ER. And that's great. But here's one you might not have heard.

It involves GHB, and chemsex, and 15 hard-boiled eggs. More specifically, it involves a 29-year-old Dutch guy who took GHB with his partner before boiling and peeling 15 eggs and inserting them—egg-by-egg—into his rectum. So far so good.

The couple's romantic night in went terribly awry, however, when the man started complaining about stomach pains. As it turns out, ingesting 15 hard-boiled eggs from the bottom end is enough to rupture a person's gastrointestinal wall. That shouldn't be surprising: even eating that many in one sitting is a feat worthy of medical attention. And, sure enough, the pair were soon on their way to the local hospital.

This was one of three stories recently featured in a Dutch Journal of Medicine paper on the subject of a "Step-by-step approach to rectal corpus alienum". The paper's authors reported that a person presenting with a foreign body lodged in their rectum is hardly rare, and that it "has even increased in recent years". This case, though, was one for the books.

By the time he got to the hospital the egg-man had an abnormally rapid heartbeat of 120 beats per minute and a respiratory rate of 28 breaths per minute. Suspecting that he may be suffering from abdominal sepsis, the doctors performed a CT scan. Then they performed emergency surgery.

"Visible in the CT scan were a perforation in the sigmoid [pelvic colon] and a considerable amount of air and fluid in the abdominal cavity," the doctors reported. "Therefore, we deemed an emergency laparotomy [a surgical incision into the abdominal cavity] necessary."

All things considered, the operation was a roaring success. The eggs were removed "as well as we could", the abdominal cavity was "thoroughly rinsed", and the intestinal rupture was sewn up. The doctors reported that the patient was monitored in intensive care for a short while before being sent on his way.

"After several days he could leave the hospital in a clinically good condition," they said.

So there you have it: an egg-related anecdote with a happy ending and a timeless lesson. Always stick to soft-boiled.