Surgeons Find 12 Gold Bars Inside Man's Stomach
A 63-year-old Indian businessman was having stomach trouble. He told his doctors he'd swallowed a water bottle cap out of anger after arguing with his wife—totally normal thing to do, nothing to see here—and had since been vomiting and having difficulty going to the bathroom.
During surgery to remove the nonexistent bottle cap, doctors at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital instead found 12 small bars of gold, weighing nearly a pound and worth about $23,000.
Dr. CS Ramachandran, who performed the surgery, was incredulous. He told the BBC,
This is the first time I have recovered gold from the stomach of a patient. I remember having taken out a bladder stone weighing 1kg from a patient. But finding gold in a patient's stomach was something unbelievable.
There's no word on why the man swallowed the gold, but it's possible that it had little to do with the state of his marriage. As the BBC points out, illegal gold smuggling is on the rise in India after the country raised the import duty on metals to combat its account deficit. One way to secretively transport the precious metal, it would seem, is by eating it.
