In Punjab, India, a teenage girl was ushered into a medical facility because she was unable to keep down her meals or drink anything. When the doctors investigated, they were shocked to discover something large, and hairy inside of the 17-year-old girl’s stomach. She was then rushed to a hospital where they administered an emergency procedure to fix her problem.
The doctors discovered a 2.2 pound hairball inside the teen’s stomach. She was diagnosed with “Rapunzel Syndrome”, also known as trichotillomania, a disorder where the sufferer has the overwhelming compulsion to pull out her own hair and eat it.
The teen had been eating her hair for an undetermined amount of time, and it collected in her stomach. It reached all the way into her colon. When the surgeons operated, they successfully extracted the large clump of human hair from her digestive tract.
There are about 120 reported cases of this strange disease that seems to affect young women at disproportionately high rates. While it is considered extremely rare, in October 2012, another teenage girl was also found to have a hairball in her stomach. That young girl’s collection of devoured hair weighed a whopping four pounds.
In September 2014, doctors removed a NINE-pound hairball from the stomach of a teenage girl in Kyrgyzstan. The 18-year-old Ayperi Alekseeva had become malnourished and dehydrated and was on the verge of death. She hadn’t eaten or drank for months. Her Rapunzel Syndrome compulsion was killing her…
Professor Bahadir Bebezov, senior professor of surgery at Bishkek Hospital, said: “By the time we got her she could not even drink water. We realized we needed to operate immediately. It was actually the only alternative – nothing else would solve the problem. In fact her stomach was so badly swollen from hair and bits of wool from the carpet that it literally just oozed out soon as the wall of the stomach was cut.”
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