An urgent investigation revealed areas of the woman’s large intestine had become inflamed, which was causing the abdominal pain.
Doctors at the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital Foundation Trust then took a CT scan of her abdomen where they were amazed to find a ‘linear object’ that looked much like a pen.
When questioned, the patient remembered that 25 years before she had used a felt-tip pen to poke her tonsils while looking at them in a mirror. However, she had then fallen forward off a step and swallowed the pen by accident.
Her husband and GP had dismissed her story at the time after plain abdominal X-rays came up normal.
The doctors performed a gastroscopy, which confirmed there was a plastic felt-tip pen sitting in the lumen of the woman’s stomach.
It hadn’t caused her any gastric damage – indeed the symptoms that had prompted the investigation in the first place had resolved themselves.
The medical team her decided that they should remove the pen as there was a small risk it could perforate her stomach lining.