This guy's got guts, and apparently, it's a golden one. A 63-year-old Indian businessman approached doctors in a Delhi hospital earlier this month, complaining of difficulty defecating and vomiting due to swallowing a water bottle cap following a fight with his wife. What doctors found instead were 12 gold biscuits weighing a total of 396 grams - all this stored inside his stomach.
The doctors at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi discovered about the gold bars when they did an X-ray of the patient, what they thought earlier were just symptoms of acute intestinal obstruction. Good thing, the bars have been removed earlier, if not there will be serious complications.
"If it would have stayed inside for couple of more days, it would have led to severe bleeding and rupture of the intestine and septicemia," said Dr. C.S Ramachandra, who is the senior consulting surgeon at the said hospital.
Dr. Ramachandra revealed it was the first time he recovered gold from a patient's abdomen and he said it was unbelievable. The doctors said the wealthy businessman, who has business in Chandni Chowk, was a known patient there. The patient, who is a diabetic, already went through four stomach surgeries - gall bladder removal, incisional hernia and appendicitis, so the latest operation was rather critical.
"It was a tedious three-hour-long operation. He is an old patient and we had to be careful," Dr. Ramachandra said.
The case has been reported immediately to officials, who later confiscated the gold and went to question the businessman.
Reports say the businessman indeed swallowed the gold biscuits weighing 33 grams each, so he could smuggle them from Singapore to India about 10 days ago. Surprisingly, he managed to escape airport security checks. The gold biscuits have been estimated to worth Rs 12 lakh. The plan was to eventually get rid of the biscuits from his stomach through his stool, but the biscuits wouldn't leave his small intestine despite having tried to use laxatives and to drink lots of fluids. He also didn't eat for 10 days in the hope that it would come out that way.
Being among the biggest consumers of gold in the world, the government of India has tightened its regulations lately on importing gold after rising cases of smuggling, by increasing three times the import tax on gold to regulate the demand. In May 2013, gold imports peaked at 162,000 kg, but went down in November at 19,300 kg, following the tax hike.
