Girl With 9-Pound Hairball Couldn’t Even Drink Water Before Emergency Surgery

A girl with a 9-pound hairball couldn’t even drink water because her digestive track was completely blocked. According to Mail Online, Ayperi Alekseeva from Kyrgyzstan would pick hair up off of the ground and eat it. She would also chew on the ends of her own hair, seemingly obsessed with consuming hair. Well, she learned the hard way that the human body isn’t so good at breaking down and digesting hair in large quantities.

Alekseeva was taken to a hospital after she told her parents that she was having severe stomach pains. Everything that she ate (aside from the hair) or drank came right back up, and nothing was passing through her digestive track. Doctors needed to perform emergency surgery after X-rays showed a blockage — and that surgery saved the girl’s life.

The 9-pound hairball was pulled from the girl’s stomach by Dr. Bahadir Bebezov. He says that there hasn’t been any evidence of a hairball that size inside of a person’s stomach noted in quite come time.

“The parents brought her in after she started losing weight, and she couldn’t eat anything. By the time we got her, she couldn’t even drink water. We realized we needed to operate immediately. It was actually the only alternative, nothing else would solve the problem. In fact, her stomach was so badly swollen from hair and bits of wool from the carpet that it literally just oozed out soon as the wall of the stomach was cut.”

This isn’t the first time that a hairball was plucked from a human stomach. According to Business Insider, doctors removed a 1-pound hairball from the stomach of a 12-year-old Chinese girl earlier this year. The girl also had an obsession with eating hair.

“People with pica [disorder] eat ice, dirt, paper, and a variety of other things; when they consume hair — a compulsion related to trichotillomania, the hair-pulling disorder — it’s called trichophagia.”

The hairballs that form in people’s stomachs actually take the shape of the stomach, so a quick Google search might provide you with quite a few photos that look like this.

As previously reported by The Inquisitr, a 19-year-old girl in India had a 4-pound hairball removed from her stomach back in 2012. Before that (in 2007), a 10-pound hairball was pulled from the stomach of a girl in Chicago. It is believed that all of these people suffered from trichophagia. All have made full recoveries following their surgeries, though it’s unknown if any are still consuming hair.

[Photo courtesy of Robotconscience]