Chicago, Illinois - (UPI) - Doctors at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago said they have removed a 10-pound hairball from an 18-year-old woman's stomach.

The doctors said that the previously healthy woman had said that she had been experiencing pain, abdominal swelling, and weight loss of 40 pounds over the course of five months.

Drs. Ronald Levy and Srinadh Komanduri said a scope lowered through the woman's esophagus revealed "a large bezoar (hairball) occluding nearly the entire stomach."

"On questioning, the patient stated that she had had a habit of eating her hair for many years -- a condition called trichophagia," the doctors wrote.

The doctors said the 10-pound hairball measured 15 inches by 7 inches by 7 inches when it was removed.
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*gags* imagine how slimey it must have been, gross. This makes me worried... I don't chew my hair, but I do share my bed with two persian cats every night. Who knows how much fur I've swallowed

I'm going to show this to my 7 yr old shes constantly got her hair in her mouth and no amount of telling her about these kinda stories works. Maybe if she sees it in print it may work .

Yuck... I can't even stand cleaning the hair from the shower drain...

gross!

That's mind boggling. O.o ( SHOCKED )

Try doing it with tweezers, all the gunk you clear out is amazing!

Actually I use needlenose pliers to clean that out... it's still gross.

Ew. That's so gross. But I'm glad that they had gotten it out of her. ><

ROFL! you crack me up

I used to suck and chew on my hair. It took years for me to grow out of it. Now my daughter has started to do it.
I hate to think how much hair I've gotten in my stomach *yuck*

Hmmm -I always thought the stomach acids could eat away at just about anything.

No=one has mentioned which hair she was eating though.......

this makes me want to gag....just the thought of eating hair ugh!!

I seen that on the news....I thought "boy you must have really been eating some hair"! Totally gross! Can you imagine what the doctors thought when they first saw it! LOL

Here's a CNN article with a photo. It's not really gross, looks more like a animal horn than a hairball, but the photo gives an idea of how massive this thing actually was.

i got an image from that "ring" movie where she pulls out the hair from her mouth

still kinda gross

woudnt she have looked bloate dwith that in her stomach?

That really is gross! I heard about a young girl in India a few years ago who,s story was simalar to this one and her stomach became so filled with hair she couldn,t eat food anymore! Odd what strange things people will do!

That picture to me was really gross...I always swallow gum, and when I was little, my mom would tell me that all the gum would stick to my intestines and just keep wrapping around them until I got sick....It didn't work, to this day I still swallow gum...

It's not the first time ive heard of this.
My mothers a nurse and she told me she operated on a 10yr old girl who had a massive hair ball in her bowl- that stopped my sisters and i eating our hair!

NICE!!!

Yeah, but no-one has answered it yet.........

does she lick pussies for a living?

That's more gross than the picture...

That's just gross.Hair in my food makes me gag something awful.
Why ever would you want to chew on your hair???YUCk

i think....im gonna be sick!