By Jim Hagarty
I’ve eaten some dangerous things in my life. My own cooking, for starters. A few houseflies on a bet. Some horse radish. A black olive.
And worst of all. Some bread pudding.
But I see now that I got away lucky. A British woman was suffering unexplained abdominal pain for months. Not being a medical professional, I would have fingered bread pudding as the possible culprit.
In reality, doctors found a 14-pound hairball in her stomach. The 23-year-old woman had eaten two pounds of her own hair every year for the past seven years. Somehow, this interfered with good stomach functioning and pain ensued.
I am not surprised by this. I have found that the only safe level of hair to consume is one pound per year, providing no bread pudding is also ingested. In my case, nature sort of helped me along by removing hair from my menu. Being bald has meant hairless meals these past few years but I still won’t eat bread pudding.
I mock, but I shouldn’t. The poor woman has two recognized medical conditions which cause her to pull out her hair and to eat it. It took doctors six hours to remove the “trichobezoar” from her stomach. The good news is, she can be treated and monitored for her strange afflictions.
No help yet for bread pudding ingesters, however.
