Doctors treating an 18-year-old girl's stomach pains were shocked to discover a massive nine-pound hairball blocking her digestive system, Huffington Post reported. The teenager received treatment at Bishkek Hospital in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek.
Ayperi Alekseeva, from Kyrgyzstan, was admitted into a hospital recently after being unable to eat or drink water without feeling sick. Doctors found out that she had been suffering from months of dehydration and malnourishment, eventually deciding to operate when they noticed the hairy blockage in X-rays.
Upon opening her stomach, they found a giant mass, weighing nine pounds, formed from years of chewing her own hair and picking up hair from the floor and eating it, according to News.com.au.
"The compulsive eating of hair is called Trichophagia, and if left unchecked it can even develop into Rapunzel Syndrome, in which a hairball develops a 'tail' which trails down into the lower intestine," The Telegraph reported.
Professor Bahadir Bebezov, senior professor of surgery at Bishkek Hospital, said: "The parents brought her in after she started losing weight, and she couldn't eat anything. By the time we got her she could not even drink water. We realized we needed to operate immediately."
"It was actually the only alternative - nothing else would solve the problem. In fact her stomach was so badly swollen from hair and bits of wool from the carpet that it literally just oozed out soon as the wall of the stomach was cut."
"Psychologically apart from a habit of picking up hair from the carpet and eating it, the young girl was perfectly normal and healthy. She also chewed the tips of her hair," Bebezov said, adding that he and his colleague, associate professor Tilek Umetaliev, had never heard of such a large hairball despite searching through 50 years of medical records.
After going through the ordeal of major surgery, the teenager promised Bebezov that she would stay away from chewing her hair in the future. Currently, she is recovering from the operation.
Yet Alekseeva's hairball - which scientists call a "trichobezoar" - is not the first nor even the largest ever dug out of a human body.
In October, 2012, doctors in Indore, India removed chalk and a hair ball weighing nearly four pounds (1.8 kilo) from the stomach and small intestine of a 19-year-old girl.
"Five years earlier, the New England Journal of Medicine used its Thanksgiving issue to highlight the jolly case of a "large bezoar" - weighing 10lbs (4.5 kilos) and 15 inches long - "occluding nearly the entire stomach" of an 18-year-old American woman," according to The Telegraph.
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