A Chinese woman ended up with a real case of pins and needles - after doctors found nine of them embedded in her body, Daily Mail reports.

Medics x-rayed Alatan Hsia, from Jarud Banner in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in a bid to get to the bottom of incredible pains she had suffered from for more than a decade.

But after identifying that pins and needles had been inserted into her body, she now needs to come up with £17,000 to pay for them to be removed.

She said: "I have suffered from the pain for years. I guess a little while longer before I finally get free of it is something I can bear."

Some of the needles were easy to remove but others need a complicated medical procedure. One needle is embedded in a lung, one in a kidney and one in the liver. Pins were also found in a leg joint and one was located just three centimetres from her heart. So, she always felt incredible pain in her body in the following years but it was only when she had an x-ray that she finally discovered the cause.

How did those needles appear in her body? She said that her first marriage was terrible and her husband used to beat her. One day she was beaten up to coma.

"When I woke up five days later my parents said that there had been no sign of him, and they had put me in bed until I recovered. None of us thought much of it but they also said that they had found nine needles on the ground lying alongside my body. I believe that after putting some of them inside me he had then fled leaving others on the floor," Alatan Hsia said.