An 87-year-old woman was in the hospital for pelvic fractures, not stomach trouble. She had no digestive symptoms at all. Yet a CT scan revealed something alarming: a large hernia had let her stomach slip up into her chest, where it had twisted on itself.
She then developed sudden respiratory failure. When doctors examined her esophagus, they found it lined with dead, blackened tissue, a rare condition called acute esophageal necrosis, or "black esophagus." The case was published Feb. 14, 2026, in the peer-reviewed journal Cureus.
