A Man Goes to the Hospital Due to Abdominal Swelling, Doctors Find 187 Coins in his Stomach

His children decided to take him to the hospital to find out what was wrong. When he was operated on, they had no idea what it could be.

The sensation of abdominal swelling is one of the most annoying sensations after eating, and although there can be several reasons, poor food intake is usually one of the main reasons for this discomfort.

The medical team of the Indian state of Karnataka has made public the reason for the stomach pain that a patient had. The pain was similar to abdominal swelling, but with the added sickness and headaches. Dyamappa Harijan, a 58-year-old Indian man, apparently suffering from schizophrenia and the reasons for his pain go back months.

Harijan had 187 coins, of various sizes, inside his stomach. He had been swallowing them for several months and at first felt no pain at all, but gradually the symptoms of severe stomach pains began. His children, seeing that his father was in extreme pain, decided to transfer him to the hospital. There, the doctors confirmed that his stomach was quite bulky and hard.

After an X-ray to determine what it might be, they discovered the coins that the man had swallowed. However, to make sure that they were coins, they decided to do an endoscopy, to verify all their suspicions.

“We decided to operate. The stomach was greatly dilated. A lot of coins were stuck in different places,” one of the doctors in charge of the case explained to the media. One of the doctors, Eshwar Kalburgi, called this experience a “challenging case”.

After the intervention and having removed all the coins from his stomach, the man is recovering from the intervention with his family, who were not aware that his father had ingested a large amount of coins.

“We didn’t know about this. He wasn’t mentally well, but he had his routine every day. He didn’t tell anyone that he had swallowed the coins,” said Ravikumar, Harijan’s son, who added that “only a few days ago, his stomach was swollen and when he slept he was in agony. But we never thought he’d swallowed coins. We found out after the medical tests”.