A 40-year-old man walked into a hospital in Japan complaining of lower abdominal pain. A CT scan found a flat, plate-like object sitting inside his distal abdominal aorta, the main artery running down through the belly toward the legs, along with a pocket of old blood up near the tip of his heart.
The object was a cutter knife blade, roughly 10 millimeters wide and 40 millimeters long. Three months earlier, while working with a cutter knife, he had sustained a penetrating injury to his left front chest wall. He had come to Japan as a migrant worker, and language barriers and cost had kept him from seeking care at the time.
