Realm of Bizarre News - Vol 1 - Bizarre hairball stories

Time to look in to the little black bag once again. Lets see what we find. Surgical gloves, a scalpel, a rat, and some shoelaces. Now this pertains to a case that was just written up recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. A gal in New England, who is eighteen had a massive hair, a humongous hairball the size of a rat in her stomach. In fact it was occupying almost all of her stomach so she could not eat. She lost forty pounds because of it. Turns out she's been gnawing on her hair since at least age ten, and over time this hairball grew and grew and became almost life threatening. And they had to perform actual surgery to remove it. Now please, please do not eat your hair, eat food. By the way, eating hair is called tricophagia. Now is this the most unusual bezoar? That's B-E-Z-O-A-R for such growths that develop from swallowing what you should not? Well, there is another case, a classic case of a mental patient having swallowed two hundred and ninety shoelaces which formed a mass that extended from his esophagus down to his small intestine. And again, surgery was required. And we have some reports today that some people are overdoing it on fiber and develop fiber bezoars in their tummies. Please, please, don't overdo it on fiber and avoid eating shoelaces and hair. We can't afford to lose even one of you out there. Thank you.