Margaret Daalman went to the hospital with stomach pains, and a quick look at her X-ray reveals why.
X-rays revealed 78 distinct pieces of silverware in the 52-year-old woman’s stomach, which astounded surgeons in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
They hurried her to surgery, hoping to remove the dozens of forks and spoons that had been lodged inside her body one by one.
‘She seemed to have some type of addiction, and every time she sat down for a meal, she would disregard the food and eat the utensils,’ one doctor claimed.
The incredible photographs were taken more than 30 years ago, but they were just recently published in a Dutch medical journal.
Readers were urged to send in instances of unusual medical stories, and the magazine received a lot of them.
Ms. Daalman’s story was submitted by a doctor at a hospital in Sittard, Netherlands.
.’I don’t know why, but I felt a need to eat the cutlery – I couldn’t help myself,’ Ms. Daalman, a secretary at a local estate agency, told physicians when she went in for her surgery.
Medical personnel also learned that this was not the first time she has been treated for eating cutlery.
They claimed she had been diagnosed with a borderline personality condition, which caused her to crave forks and spoons.
She, on the other hand, never ate knives and couldn’t explain why.
Ms. Daalman has made a full recovery and is thought to be responding well to the disorder’s treatment.
According to an article on Psychiatry Online, foreign item ingestion is a little-discussed sort of disease.
Individuals with pica may seek and consume non-food things as well as an unusual number or variety of food commodities.
The behavior, which is classified as a kind of self-harm, is difficult for doctors to detect because the damage is not always visible, unlike in self-harming individuals who burn or mutilate themselves.
It’s also practically hard to block access to all potentially ingestible materials, according to the article, making it difficult to discontinue the behavior without mental help.
Doctors in Rotterdam claimed they had never heard of somebody ingesting so many strange things.