A doctor has opened up about some of the most unusual finds he's come across in the course of his career - including a penny lodged inside a patient's bottom.
Benjamin Schmidt, best known to TikTok followers as Doc Schmidt, claimed he had been carrying out a colonoscopy on a patient with a history of colon cancer, a procedure which is pretty routine in his line of work.
After checking that the cancer hadn’t returned, Doc Schmidt thankfully found the patient's passage to be healthy. However, it was then that he spotted a flash of silver.
Doc Schmidt, 31, noticed the coin lodged up inside the patient's cecum, the part of the colon that is furthest away from the anus, and has no clue as to how it ended up there.
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The medic, who St. Louis, Missouri, United States, recently shared his story via TikTok, with the video going on to clock up more than 1.2 million views and 69,000 likes.
Doc Schmidt said: "I was performing a typical colonoscopy – which is something I do four to five times a day – and when I reached the cecum, I found a dime. I had never seen anything like it and the patient had no recollection of swallowing it."
He added: "This video was hugely popular, I think many videos of unusual medical cases and findings do well because of the natural curiosity of humans.
"Videos about objects found in patients’ rectums certainly trigger a lot of shock but I think this video did particularly well due to the level of mystery.
"That this wasn't found in the rectum, it was found in a part of the colon that couldn't be easily reached so we really don't know how the dime got there!"
The vid soon racked up hundreds of comments, with one user joking: “He swallowed a penny a few years ago and ya know…inflation.”
Another person suggested, “Maybe he swallowed a quarter and was making change", while a third shuddered, "I swallowed a nickel as a kid and I was never worried about it… UNTIL NOW.”
A fourth person, who also appears to work in the medical field, recalled: “I retrieved a garden stone that had ‘Carpe Diem’ engraved on it".
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