A 16-year-old girl arrived at a local emergency room after a day of vomiting. A scan there found something odd enough that she was transferred to Albany Medical Center, where a doctor could feel a hard mass through the wall of her upper abdomen.
Surgeons opened her up and pulled out a tangle of hair weighing roughly 1,500 grams, about three and a third pounds. Pathology described it as an aggregate of brown hair and food particles packed tightly into the shape of her stomach, measuring 21.2 by 15.8 by 7.7 centimeters. A tail of hair ran out of the stomach and threaded through the first, second, and third portions of her duodenum, roughly 20 centimeters long.
