A 15-year-old boy had to be rushed to the hospital after he inserted a USB cable into his penis and it got stuck.
The unidentified teenager, from London, ended up needing surgery after the cable knotted and got stuck inside him.
The boy made several attempts to remove it himself but this resulted in him urinating a large amount of blood, prompting his family to take him to A&E.
Doctors detailed the incident in the journal Urology Case Reports.
At the hospital he was taken to, staff also couldn’t pull out the cable using special tools due to the position of the knot, so the boy was urgently transferred to University College Hospital London for further treatment.
He asked to be examined without his mother present before confessing to staff that he inserted the cable to measure his penis out of sexual curiosity.
After an X-ray revealed the exact size and positions of the knot, the teen was sent to surgery.
Surgeons cut through the muscles surrounding the penis and scrotum and then severed and removed the knot.
Medics managed to extract the knot through the incision and then cut it free from the rest of the cable. The remaining two pieces of the cable were pulled out the opening of his penis once the knot was removed.
There were no complications in his recovery and he was discharged from the hospital the next day.
Follow-up scans two weeks later revealed no lasting damage but doctors noted the boy will need ongoing monitoring in the future.
Consultant andrologist, Dr Amr Raheem told Mail Online: “Although the surgery was successful and without immediate complications, he may later develop narrowing of the urethra which can give him problems when passing urine or predispose him to recurrent urinary tract infection.
“When you introduce anything inside your body that is not sterile, you can cause a tissue infection, infections can sometimes be serious especially in people with low immunity as in diabetics, a serious infection can lead to tissue necrosis or even sepsis.
“I believe it is becoming more common as everything is thanks to social media and in general the easier ways that misinformation can be spread.
“We certainly have seen an increase in these practices amongst patients that present with symptoms in our clinics.”
