The recovered Faberge locket. Photo / NZ Police
By RNZ Online
A pendant swallowed by a man during an alleged theft at an Auckland jewellery store made headlines around the world and raised questions about how exactly it was “recovered”.
Police were called at 3.30pm last Friday to the store where a man was accused of picking up a Faberge James Bond Octopussy Egg pendant and swallowing it.
On Saturday, Inspector Grae Anderson told RNZ the man underwent a medical assessment at the time of his arrest and the item was back in their possession.
But what internal journey did the pendant take, from entering an opportune robber’s mouth to being safely recovered?
University of Auckland senior lecturer and gastroenterologist Dr Cameron Shower said the trip could be broken down into three sections.
“The first part, really, from your mouth all the way through to your bottom,” he told RNZ Nights.
“So, break it up into the oesophagus or food tube, travels down there, and then into the stomach, and out of the stomach, and that first portion of the trip is about half a metre long.
“Second portion of the trip would be the small intestine. That’s where absorption of nutrients normally happens when you’re having your fish and chips, and that’s about up to five metres long.
“Then the final portion of the trip is it squeezes from the small intestine to the large intestine, and that’s where stool, faeces, poo is, as we know it, and that’s the one and a half metre trip before it exits south and re-emerges.”
While some may have been stumped as to how the pendant was recovered without medical intervention, Shower breathed a sigh of relief when he saw a picture of it.
He said the pendant’s lack of sharp edges and its relatively small size eased his concern.
“You worry when things are sharp, or they’re wide, talking sort of two, two and a half centimetres, that’s when things start to sort of scrape down and can cause problems and squeeze through,” Shower said.
“So I looked at the picture, and I thought, that’s just going to require a bit of patience. In other situations, if you’re a little less patient, you can get folks to swallow laxatives or bowel preparation, and things can whip through a lot faster than the usual sort of one to three days a meal that it might take to come out.”
But for those unaware of how stomach acids work, it raised the question, why didn’t the body break down the pendant during its journey?
Shower said the stomach acid pH is around 1.5 or 2, which he said is not acidic enough to have any kind of effect on the expensive locket.
“Coca-Cola, on the other hand, that would probably dissolve a lot more things than our own stomach acid,” he said.
“Really, we just use stomach acid mainly in modern life to kill off any viruses or bacteria that you might ingest, but certainly not enough to dissolve or cause any damage to the locket.”
Shower said ingesting items such as batteries or beer bottle lids, which both happened often, was a lot more concerning.
But he had seen even more frightening items ingested, requiring medical intervention.
“I think this year we’ve had some good, interesting cases, I should say. We’ve had removed some vapes ... and they can be tricky to take out.
“There’s always sort of a discussion between ourselves and other specialists as to whether or not we should let things pass and let nature take its course, or should we try to retrieve it with our gastroscope, which is like your hose pipe, about as thick as your ring finger, and goes through the mouth.
“You’re usually comfortable in the sleep, and whether or not we can retrieve it back out of the food tube or oesophagus, which is two to three centimetres wide, and you sort of can imagine we had a toothbrush about mid-year, and that got stuck.
“And of course, you have to get it in the right axis, meaning you have to sort of have it facing lengthways because it doesn’t come out sideways and you don’t want to scratch or cause any troubles on the way out.”
- RNZ