A 35-year-old man in China walked into a hospital complaining of painful urination and blood in his urine, and doctors discovered needle-like metallic objects lodged in his heart, abdomen, pelvis, bladder, and penis.
The case, detailed in a report published by the New York Post, reads like something out of a medical textbook's most disturbing chapter. A contrast-enhanced CT scan revealed multiple foreign bodies scattered across the man's torso and lower body. One metallic pin, just 1.4 inches long, had pierced the pericardium, the protective sac surrounding his heart.
Surgeons operated and extracted an intact, black metallic sewing needle from the pericardium. It was corroded, suggesting it had been inside the man's body for a significant period. No obvious entry wound or scar was found on his chest.
Neither the patient nor his father, who serves as his legal caregiver, could explain how the needles got there. The man has a childhood history of intellectual disability. Doctors suspect he engaged in self-embedding, a recognized form of non-suicidal self-injury in which a person deliberately inserts objects beneath the skin.
The absence of any entry wound or scar on the patient's chest posed its own puzzle. How a sewing needle reached the pericardium without leaving a trace on the surface remains unexplained in the case report. Doctors did not offer a definitive answer.
This was not the man's first encounter with embedded objects. Roughly two years before this hospital visit, doctors at a separate facility had removed two foreign objects from his abdomen. That earlier procedure apparently did not prompt broader imaging to check for additional objects elsewhere in his body.
After the pericardial needle was removed, the patient's heart function declined, likely due to existing damage the needle had already caused. He was discharged nine days after surgery. At a follow-up appointment nine months later, he was clinically stable and his heart function had recovered.
The remaining needles, still lodged in his abdomen, pelvis, bladder, and penis, were not surgically removed. Doctors chose to monitor them rather than attempt additional extractions. The total number of foreign bodies found across all locations was not specified.
Self-embedding is rare but not unheard of in medical literature. One of the earliest documented cases dates to 1936, when Albert Fish, a convicted serial killer, was found to have nearly 30 needles embedded in his groin, along with additional needles in his abdomen. An X-ray of his pelvis remains archived on Wikimedia Commons.
Similar cases surfaced in medical journals during the 1980s. By the 2010s, doctors began reporting the behavior more frequently, particularly among teenagers who deliberately implanted foreign objects beneath their skin. Research published by the Radiological Society of North America examined several of those adolescent cases.
But a grown man found with metallic fragments spread across five distinct regions of his body, heart, abdomen, pelvis, bladder, and penis, stands out even within that small body of literature. The case report, published through Springer, adds to a medical record that remains thin and poorly understood.
Key questions remain unanswered. No formal psychiatric diagnosis of self-embedding disorder was reported, only the treating doctors' suspicion. The patient's name, the hospital's identity, and the city where he was treated were all withheld. Whether the remaining needles have migrated or caused new complications since the nine-month follow-up is unknown.
When a man walks into a hospital with a corroded sewing needle lodged next to his heart and nobody, not the patient, not his caregiver, can explain how it got there, the medical mystery is unsettling enough. That it took a second hospital visit and a second set of foreign objects before anyone thought to scan the rest of his body is the part that should keep people up at night.
