Most of America has either had or is just about to have their Thanksgiving meal; Turkey (unless you don’t eat meat), cranberry sauce, stuffing or dressing, and gravy, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, dumplings, corn on the cob or hominy, deviled eggs, green beans or green bean casserole, and some apple pie, mincemeat pie, sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie, chocolate meringue pie and pecan pie as dessert. One 18-year-old doesn’t find that appetizing at all. New England Journal of Medicine is devoting part of its Thanksgiving special to this 18-year-old girl; she consulted a team of gastrointestinal specialists. Complaining of pain and swelling in her abdomen, vomiting after eating and a 40-pound weight loss; something that had been going on for five months.

The doctors scanned the woman’s abdomen; it revealed a large mass. When doctors lowered a scope through her esophagus and found “a large bezoar occluding nearly the entire stomach,” wrote Drs. Ronald M. Levy and Srinadh Komanduri, gastroenterologists at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois.

For those of you, including me before this, who don’t know what a bezoar is; it is a hairball. More specifically, in the human case it is called a Trichobezoar.

When the doctors questioned the woman, she said that she had a habit of eating her hair for many years. This condition is called Trichophagia; compulsive eating of hair.

The 18-year-old underwent surgery to remove the mass of black, curly hair. It weighed 10 pounds and measured about 15 inches by 7 by 7 inches, the doctors said.

That is one giant hairball.

Five days later, she was eating normally and was sent home. A year later, the pain and vomiting were gone, the patient had regained 20 pounds “and reports that she has stopped eating her hair.”

Reached at his home in Chicago, Levy said he had no idea whether the journal’s timing of the publication on Thanksgiving was intentional.

Either way, he said, it would not affect the gastroenterologists’ holiday dinner plans — “We don’t get fazed by much.

source: cnn.com