Health professionals have long had to deal with patients who inadvisably shoved a whole range of foreign objects up their behinds, often requiring medical intervention to retrieve them.
It’s a surprisingly common issue. According to a 2023 study, there are around 4,000 cases a year of both male and female individuals visiting emergency departments for what the researchers euphemistically termed “rectal foreign bodies.”
Now, in a twist to the age-old story that even the writing room of “Grey’s Anatomy” couldn’t have come up with, a man in France was rushed to the operating room after staffers at the Rangueil Hospital in Toulouse found out he had shoved a 37mm brass-and-copper “collectible shell” that was used by the Imperial German Army during World War 1 up his rectum.
As Agence France-Presse reports, officials had to call in a bomb disposal team and evacuate the hospital after the man was admitted over the weekend. Firefighters were called in as well to “ensure fire protection during the bomb disposal team’s intervention.”
Fortunately, emergency teams later confirmed that the “explosive device has been neutralized,” ending the unusual incident.
The unnamed man is 24 years old and could be facing legal action for handling “category A munitions,” an officer told the Daily Mail.
Beyond being found inside people’s rectums, around 1.5 billion shells were fired during World War 1, according to the Military Times. The ordnances are still being collected to this day.
Amazingly, it’s somehow not the first time a Frenchman has been rushed to the hospital after shoving a shell up his behind. In late 2022, an 88-year-old stuck a World War 1 artillery shell in his rectum; surgeons at a hospital in Toulon, France, were forced to make an incision in his abdomen to retrieve the ancient relic.
The discovery was understandably a major surprise at the time.
“An apple, a mango, or even a can of shaving foam, we are used to finding unusual objects inserted where they shouldn’t be,” one ER doctor told French newspaper Var-Matin. “But a shell? Never!”
In an even more potentially dangerous ploy, a man in England managed to lodge a two-inch wide World War 2 anti-tank shell where the Sun don’t shine, forcing a hospital in Gloucester to also call in a bomb disposal team.
The man told officials at the time that he allegedly “slipped and fell” on the ordnance.
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