A man suffering from stomach pains went under the knife - to remove a 9-inch plastic dinner fork that had been in his stomach more than a decade.
Lee Gardner, 40, had been leaning on a chair playing with the fork in his mouth when he gagged and accidentally swallowed it.
He was told the disposable cutlery would 'pass through naturally' so he forgot about it until he was admitted to Barnsley Hospital vomiting blood.
Lee said: "The advice when I swallowed it from the doctor was that it would just pass through my system and as that was so many years before I really didn't think it could be the fork."
Medics had to operate to remove the fork. Consultant general surgeon, Hanis Shiwani said Lee was lucky.
"If it had been a metal fork, or had got stuck in the gullet it would have caused more damage earlier."
Read the full remarkable story in today's Chronicle.
