A 70-year-old woman in Japan arrived at an emergency department with sudden pain below her breastbone that began immediately after a bout of nausea and retching. She had not actually vomited. Within hours, surgeons were repairing a 35-millimeter tear in her esophagus while a second emergency surgery was performed in her groin.
The case, from Nagoya Tokushukai General Hospital in Kasugai, was published this year in the American Journal of Case Reports. The authors describe the pairing as extremely rare, with only a limited number of similar cases reported in the literature.
