Immense trichobezoar

As reported by The Telegraph:

Doctors treating a teenage girl who had become unable to drink water without being sick were shocked to excavate a gigantic nine-pound hairball from inside her stomach. Ayperi Alekseeva, 18, from Kyrgyzstan, suffered months of dehydration and malnourishment because she couldn’t eat or drink, and came close to death...

Five years earlier, the New England Journal of Medicine used its Thanksgiving issue to highlight the jolly case of a “large bezoar” – weighing 10lbs (4.5 kilos) and 15 inches long – “occluding nearly the entire stomach” of an 18-year-old American woman.

The compulsive eating of hair is called trichophagia, and if left unchecked it can even develop into Rapunzel Syndrome, in which a hairball develops a ‘tail’ which trails down into the lower intestine. 

See also Hairball Awareness Day, where I posted a photo of a Rapunzel syndrome bezoar.