Ten days after bowel surgery, a 90-year-old man spiked a fever. A chest X-ray ordered for suspected pneumonia turned up something far more alarming: a massive volume of free air inside his abdomen that had not been there on a CT scan three days earlier.
In almost any textbook, that finding after a bowel resection means the join between the two cut ends of intestine has failed, and it means going back to the operating room. He never did. He went home 24 days after his original operation, and his surgeons wrote him up under a title no medical journal had printed before: anastomotic fart.
