For three years, a 65-year-old woman in Culiacán, Mexico, had bouts of diarrhea that no treatment could stop. In the year before she landed in the emergency department, she lost about 15 kilograms, roughly 33 pounds.
When she finally arrived with 15 days of upper right abdominal pain and vomiting, she was dehydrated, her blood pressure had fallen to 83/36, and she had acute kidney injury. A CT scan showed a mottled, spongy-looking mass inside her small intestine, and doctors took it for a bezoar, a hard clump of undigested material. During emergency surgery, it turned out to be 30 centimeters of surgical gauze, about a foot long, left inside her during a hysterectomy 15 years earlier.
