A New Delhi man’s colon burst after his ‘perverted’ friends put a compressed air pump into his anus and inflated it, causing his rectum to explode and his entire bowel to be removed.
Apparently, the air flow produced by an air compressor are at least 100 times higher than what would be considered safe for a colonoscopy, resulting in injuries which are normally ‘confined to battlefields’.
The man whose friends subjected him to the injury had ‘multiple colonic perforations’ and doctors found faecal matter among his other internal organs.
In a paper in the Journal of Medical Case Reports, doctors explained how air pressurised beyond a certain point ‘forms a column that acts like a solid body’.
A sudden inrush of air into the body can lead to injuries called barotrauma.
Barotrauma, although rare, occurs when the pressure inside a bodily tissue is higher than the area outside it, which causes it to burst.
Air pumped into the anus, for example, would travel straight into the bowel and inflate the organ like a balloon until it couldn’t withstand the pressure any more and ruptured.
If air was pumped in the same manner into the mouth it could have the same effect on the stomach or lungs.
This isn’t there first instance of such an accident.
According to The Daily Mail:
In a separate case study, a 34-year-old man who worked at a petrol pump was taken to hospital with similar injuries after trying to stop a burglary.
He had what doctors called a ‘rectal blowout’ and needed most of his colon removed and a colostomy bag fitted.
The report said he had suffered ‘an alleged compressed air insult by robbers while thwarting the robbery. The robbers had thrust the compressed air nozzle into his anus’.
And in the third report, a 24-year-old man went to a hospital emergency department with an ‘alleged history of accidental injury to the anus by compressed air jet’.
The man said the air nozzle was about 25cm (9.8 inches) away from his backside and was only on for a second.
He had a swollen, painful torso and the inside of his abdomen was covered with faeces and blood, the doctors said.
Surgeons had to remove part of his intestine because of damage caused by the incident.
I think the lessons here are clear.
(Photo: Pixabay)
