Leaking organs have been added to the long list of things that COVID-19 can cause. In a case report, doctors detail how a patient’s COVID-19 cough caused organs to leak out from an old surgical site. The patient was hospitalized, but surgeons were able to safely put him back together.
This article contains graphic images which some readers may find disturbing.
Surgeons at the University of Illinois at Chicago reported the case of a 52-year-old woman who had undergone abdominal surgery more than 10 years ago to treat a hernia. Unfortunately, the hernia continued to cause symptoms and required additional surgeries to repair it over the years.
Abdominal cough
Five days before visiting the hospital, the woman had contracted COVID-19. After a series of coughing fits and one particularly unlucky bout, her intestines burst through the site of her hernia repair. By the time she arrived at the hospital, her condition was so severe she needed to be resuscitated. However, surgeons were able to carefully push her intestines back into place and close the wound without any major complications.
Abdominal wounds from surgery can sometimes reopen, but reports of organs spilling out of a reopened wound — a literal evisceration, or disembowelment — are extremely rare. These cases are often accompanied by coughing, because a forceful cough can cause a rapid increase in abdominal air pressure. This woman’s history of surgery made her more susceptible to such injuries. But this still seems unusual.
A rare event during the coronavirus pandemic
“To our knowledge, this is the first case of evisceration due to worsening COVID-19 infection,” the doctors wrote in their case report. Published In Journal of Gastroenterological Surgery Published in March 2022. A version of this paper is available at Available online January 2024.
The woman required several layers of stitches to keep her internal organs from moving, but she started eating again within two days of surgery and was released from hospital six days after surgery, feeling great. Doctors have provided some photos of the horrific injuries and the successful repairs that followed, but we don’t recommend viewing these photos for anyone without a (figuratively) strong stomach.
While such cases are rare, it is the second such case to have attracted media attention this month. I have written A 63-year-old man sneezed and expelled his innards from the surgical site shortly after a medical examination determined his wounds were fully healed. The man’s breakfast and shirt were ruined, but he too made a full recovery.
Clearly the lesson to be learned from these highly unusual injuries is to never cough.
