24.
And finally, “My best friend is an ER nurse, and she once told me about a patient who completely shattered her ‘seen-it-all’ mentality. A middle-aged man came in with mysterious, worsening abdominal pain. Scans showed a strange shadow near his intestine, but nothing concrete. During exploratory surgery, they found a fully intact, rusted Hot Wheels car lodged in his gut.”
“Turns out, he’d apparently swallowed it as a toddler decades earlier. His parents never believed his childhood claims of ‘eating a race car,’ chalking it up to imaginary kid stories. The car had silently migrated through his body for 30 years before causing a blockage. The entire surgical team just stared at it — nurses, surgeons, everyone. She said it was like unearthing a cursed archaeological relic.
Her exact words: ‘You stop being surprised by OD’s or trauma… then life hands you a guy who’s been hauling around a 1993 Toyota Celica in his spleen.'”
