A 4-year-old boy reached a Japanese operating room after five days of abdominal pain and vomiting that another hospital had treated as ordinary stomach flu. When surgeons opened his abdomen, his small intestine had rotated 900 degrees counterclockwise around its own blood supply. Two and a half complete turns.
The bowel was not dead. After the team untwisted it, the intestine was viable, with no necrosis anywhere along its length.
