Doctors untangle the strange case of the giant hairball

This passes for news on CNN this a.m.


(CNN) -- It may not be the most appetizing reading before a hearty holiday meal, but the New England Journal of Medicine is devoting part of its Thanksgiving issue to a giant hairball -- and not the feline kind.



Doctors say this hairball removed from a woman's stomach weighed 10 pounds.

The prestigious journal details the case of a previously healthy 18-year-old woman who consulted a team of gastrointestinal specialists.

She complained of a five-month history of pain and swelling in her abdomen, vomiting after eating and a 40-pound weight loss.

After a scan of the woman's abdomen showed a large mass, doctors lowered a scope through her esophagus.

It revealed "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 the uninitiated, a bezoar is a hairball.

"On questioning, the patient stated that she had had a habit of eating her hair for many years -- a condition called trichophagia," they wrote.

"It seemed like she'd been doing this for several years," Levy told CNN.

more...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/11/21/hairball.case/

If I get one hair in my mouth I freak out.

just kidding, I'm not married.

Seriously... It isn't easy not to look good in a photo capturing people engaged in active speech. Clinton looks very attractive in that shot, but there isn't a bad one among them. Dennis always makes me smile. His features are so small, yet he has such conviction and fire, he strikes me as a bit of a "Giant-slayer."

That is..well..just disgusting.

Blech..eating her own hair. I gag at the thought.