French WW1 shell removed from an 80 year old man

[Simon Birch]

In yesterday's daily Telegraph - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/12/21/hospital-evacuated-80-year-old-man-has-first-world-war-removed/ - the text below appeared. I don't know what else to say.

Simon

A French hospital had to be evacuated after a man in his 80s presented to doctors with a First World War shell stuck inside his rear.

Though the 88-year-old assured staff the shell was a collector’s item that had been deactivated, staff at the Sainte Musse Hospital in Toulon scrambled to evacuate some of its patients, redirect others, and call in the bomb squad.

“An apple, a mango, or even shaving foam…we’re used to finding unusual objects inserted where they shouldn’t be,” an unnamed ER staffer told the local paper Nice-Matin, which broke the story.

“But a shell? Never.”

The man’s appearance at the hospital required a major reshuffling and partial evacuation of patients, most notably the paediatric unit, to the main hall. For a few hours on that Saturday evening, new patients were also redirected to other hospitals. 

The gynaecology and maternity wards were the only units that operated mostly undisturbed.

As an added precautionary measure, a make-shift tent was also set up outside the hospital to treat the octogenarian in isolation.

Doctors performed abdominal surgery

Once the bomb technicians confirmed that the shell was indeed inactive and ruled out the possibility of an explosion, doctors proceeded with the removal of the war relic. But as told to the Nice-Matin, “it rarely comes out from where it comes in”.

To extract the shell, which measured around six centimetres in diameter and 20 centimetres in length, doctors had to perform abdominal surgery and remove it from the other end.

The man had reportedly found the shell at his brother’s home. The surgery went smoothly and the patient is recovering.

Hospital management confirmed to Nice-Matin that the unusual incident occurred between 9pm and 11.30pm on Saturday “requiring the intervention of bomb defusers, the evacuation of adult and paediatric emergencies as well as the redirection of emergency flow”.

Along with an internal memo from hospital management thanking staff for their mobilisation that night, a photo of the extracted shell also made the rounds among workers and eventually on the internet after being posted online.

[Alan24]

We had this story last week.