The hairball extended into her intestines. (Image via Shutterstock)
It’s
called the Rapunzel syndrome, but there’s nothing fairytale-like about
the condition. In layman’s terms, it’s a massive hairball that extends
from one’s stomach into the small intestine or beyond.
As io9
explained in 2013, hair is made of keratin, a substance so steely that
the human body can’t break it down — nor can it move it out of the
digestive system, possibly because “it’s too slippery to get pulled out
along with the rest of the stomach contents."
Just
how long one of these hairballs, called a trichobezoar, can be is made
clear by the removal of one from a 15-year-old girl in India: It
measured 5 feet in length. The Mirror
shares the fairly graphic story of Kavita Kumari, a teen whose
hair-swallowing addiction was so severe she allegedly ate the hair of
her classmates as well as her own.
When
the 15-year-old experienced a protruding stomach and severe pain, her
parents began taking her to doctors and ultimately to a hospital in
Uttar Pradesh. A CT scan there revealed the hairball, as well as a
sizable lesion. "Her condition was so bad that I had told her parents
she might not make it through the surgery,” says Dr. Lal Bahadur
Sidharth, who described the teen as so weak she could hardly stand. But
Kavita did indeed make it through the two-hour surgery, and the Mirror reports she should be able to eat again soon, which she apparently hadn’t been able to do.
A 2009 study in Clinical Medicine & Research
found that “trichobezoar with Rapunzel syndrome is an uncommon
diagnosis in children with less than 40 cases reported.” A 9-pound
hairball was recovered in one patient last year
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