For four and a half months after a Whipple operation, a 72-year-old man in Taiwan could not keep food down. More than a liter of bile drained from his nasogastric tube every day. Scans kept showing a dilated limb of bowel and, frustratingly, no definite transition point. No stricture, no narrowing, nothing that explained the volume coming back up.
There was no blockage because nothing was blocked. His small bowel had been reconnected backward, and its muscular contractions were pushing everything in the wrong direction.
