Woman, 61, swallows a toothpick, and it ends up in her LIVER

A woman was left needing emergency surgery after she swallowed a toothpick which ended up in her liver.

Doctors did not explain exactly how the sharp object punctured through the unnamed 61-year-old’s liver.

However, similar cases of people who have ingested toothpicks show they can easily penetrate organs inside the stomach.

The woman, believed to be from Beirut, had been suffering in pain all over her body for two months before she decided to go to hospital.

Doctors at Saint Georges Hospital University Medical Center carried out a series of tests - but all considered causes of her pain came back as negative.

Even an ultrasound on her abdomen, which was where she felt the most amount of pain, did not raise any flags.

An early CT scan of the woman's abdomen revealed there was a 3cm lesion in her liver, which the authors call an abscess cavity.

The doctors began to question if a foreign object had caused the internal injury.

There were also signs of fat stranding, a sign of inflammation, between part of the large bowel and the liver, which is how the two organs 'communicated'.

The woman was put on two weeks on antibiotics, but her symptoms persisted, according to the tale published in Clinical Case Reports.

An MRI scan then showed the lesion had doubled in size and surgeons decided to operate, according to author of the report, Dr Antoine El Asmar.

The team of medics came across a fine wooden tip protruding from the site, which they discovered to be a toothpick.

Around 136 cases of toothpick ingestion causing stabbing of organs in the stomach area have been reported in the US, medical literature states.

Of these, toothpicks made their way to the liver and patients needed surgery in 15 of the cases.

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