Kicking “money-hungry” up another notch
By Herb Drill
You have to be assured how chaotic this world is when you read something like the Associated Press dispatch concerning French doctors, who were taken aback when they discovered the reason for a patient’s sore, swollen belly:
The man had swallowed approximately 350 coins - $650 worth - along with assorted necklaces and needles.
Leave it to the French!
It seems the 62-year-old man came to the emergency room of Cholet General Hospital in western France in 2002. He had a history of major psychiatric illness, was suffering from stomach pain, and couldn’t eat or move his bowels. His family warned doctors he sometimes swallowed coins, and a few had been removed from his stomach in past hospital visits. Still, doctors were awed when they took an X-ray. They discovered an enormous opaque mass in his stomach which turned out to weigh 12 pounds - as much as some bowling balls. It was so heavy it had forced his stomach down between his hips.
Five days after his arrival, doctors cut him open and removed his badly damaged stomach with its contents. He died 12 days later from complications.
One of his doctors said the patient had swallowed the coins - French currency and later euros (he wasn’t fussy or politically swayed) - over the course of a decade. His family tried to keep coins and jewelry away from him.
“When he was invited and came in some homes, he liked to steal coins and eat them,” the doctor said.
The French patient’s name was withheld, but his rare condition is called “pica,” not the term referring to tiny type by a compulsion to eat things not normally consumed as food. Its name comes from the Latin word for magpie, a bird thought to eat just about anything. It seem pica can take the form of eating dirt, ashes, chalk, hair, soap, toothbrushes, burned matches, and many other things.
Not on the list was my mother-in-law’s cooking!
The man’s doctor once treated a patient who ate forks. Most such objects are small enough to pass on their own, but some must be removed by doctors. The condition is perhaps best known in children and pregnant women but is sometimes linked to psychiatric illness.
A few details of the Frenchman’s case were presented Jan. 1 along with the X-ray - but no explanation of the stomach mass - as a challenge to New England Journal of Medicine readers in a fixture called “A Medical Mystery.”
Dr. Lindsey Baden, an editor at the journal, reported 666 readers in 73 countries - mostly doctors or doctors-in-training - contacted the journal to try to solve the mystery. Almost 90% settled on diagnoses consistent with pica, but only 8% correctly identified coins.
“This case serves as a reminder of important factors that should be considered in the care of patients who are mentally impaired,” Baden wrote.
And much of the “civilized” world claims the Jews are money-hungry?