A teenage boy nearly died when a live eel wriggled into his throat for five hours, the eel blocked his airways and left him struggling to breathe. The DailyMail reports:
The 16-year-old boy, from Bangladesh, was fishing in a canal with his friend and spotted two eels.
He caught one of them, but wanting to catch them both, he put the 6.5 inch-long fish between his teeth to free up his hands while trying to catch the other. Unfortunately, the fish wriggled about, slipped into his mouth and down his throat. He ran back to his house, where his family saw the fish inside his throat and frantically tried to pull it out.
But because it was alive and moving, it slipped down beyond their vision, according to a case report in the medical journal BMC Research Notes. The family rushed to a local clinic but when doctors tried to find the fish, it was nowhere to be seen.
The boy was then taken to Dhaka Medical College Hospital – and by this point was having difficulty breathing. His father explained to doctors he believed there was a fish stuck in his son’s throat, but that they couldn’t see it. Doctors examined his throat and saw some lacerations, but could not see the fish either.
They decided to carry out an emergency operation in which they cut the front of his neck and inserted a tube into his windpipe to help him breathe, but they found they couldn’t get sufficient air into his lungs. Five hours after the accident had occurred, doctors spotted the tail fin of a fish through the hole they had created in his windpipe.