An 82-year-old woman arrived at the hospital with two days of abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting, and had passed neither stool nor gas for several days. A CT scan of her abdomen and pelvis found the reason: a fecaloma, a mass of hardened stool, measuring 12.2 by 10.5 centimeters and lodged across her sigmoid colon and rectum. There was no sign of perforation, but there was also no way through. Manual disimpaction failed because clinicians could not reach the mass.
Twelve days of conventional treatment did nothing. What finally worked, according to a case report published in Cureus, was two one-liter enemas of Classic Coca-Cola. The report appeared April 21.
