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We all know chewing your hair is a gross habit. It’s germy, it’s bad for your hair, and no one likes looking at a hair-chewer.
You might even have heard that chewing your hair can result in hair balls. “Naaah!” You thought to yourself. “That sounds like an urban legend.”
People: It is not an urban legend.
Ayperi Alekseeva, an 18-year-old girl from Kyrgyzstan’s Batken Province was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery when she complained she was unable to eat or drink.
After discovering a blockage, doctors decided to perform emergency surgery. It turned out the blockage was a hairball weighing 4 kilograms.
Yes. You read that right. The teenaged girl had a 4 kilogram hairball lodged inside her.
Doctors believe that the girl would have died if she hadn’t received the surgery. After searching through 50 years worth of medical records the hospital’s senior professor of surgery, Bahadir Bebezov, couldn’t find a comparable case.
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He told Central European News: “The parents brought her in after she started losing weight, and she couldn’t eat anything. By the time we got her she could not even drink water. We realised 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.
‘Psychologically apart from a habit of picking up hair from the carpet and eating it the young girl was perfectly normal and healthy. She also chewed the tips of her hair.”
If you don’t need a lie-down after reading this, you can find pictures of the whole ghoulish incident here.
My Strange Addiction has covered a woman with a similar, but slightly different issue too…
Do you chew your hair? Will you stop now?
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