Ten days after surgeons removed part of his colon, a 90-year-old man in New Zealand spiked a fever. A chest X-ray, ordered because his doctors suspected pneumonia, came back showing a massive volume of free air trapped inside his abdomen. In almost any other circumstance, that image sends a patient straight back to the operating room. His team at Nelson Hospital did nothing of the sort. They watched him instead, and he went home two weeks later to live independently, as he had before.
The reason they held off has now been written into the medical literature under a heading no journal had printed before. The case appears in the Journal of Surgical Case Reports under the title "Anastomotic fart."
