Chinese Doctors Found Foreign Objects in a Man’s Penis and That Wasn’t the Scariest Part

A 35-year-old man walked into a hospital in Changsha, China, because it hurt to pee.

His vital signs looked fine, but one imaging test showed a strange shadow sitting right beside his heart.

What surgeons eventually pulled from his chest had been hiding there a long time, and nobody could explain how it got in.

A Shadow Beside the Heart Turned Out to Be a Sewing Needle

Two weeks of bloody urine and painful trips to the bathroom finally sent him to the First Affiliated Hospital of Hunan Normal University.

He had no chest pain, no shortness of breath, and nothing that would send a doctor looking at his heart.

That shadow earned him a contrast CT scan, and the results stopped doctors cold – multiple "needle-like metallic foreign bodies" scattered through his body.

They were in his abdominal wall, his pelvis, his bladder, and even his penis.

The worst one was a 1.4-inch sewing needle that had pierced the sac around his heart and lodged in the wall of the left ventricle – the chamber that pumps blood out to the entire body.

That one put his life at risk.

No Scar on His Chest and No Explanation

The man has had an intellectual disability since childhood, and he couldn't tell doctors how the needles got there.

His father, the man's legal caregiver, had no answers either.

But his records held a clue – a different hospital had already removed a pair of foreign objects from his abdomen two years before this visit.

Doctors put that together and suspected self-embedding, a rare type of self-injury where objects end up under the skin or deeper inside the body.

Surgeons found no entry wound and no scar anywhere on his chest.

The needle had turned black with corrosion, which told them it had not arrived recently.

So this man went about his daily life with a sewing needle in his heart, and nobody around him – not his family, not his earlier doctors – knew it was there.

The Chinese medical team wrote that in patients with cognitive impairment, cases like this "can be clinically occult, requiring a high index of clinical suspicion."

Surgeons Pulled the Heart Needle and Left the Rest Inside Him

Surgeons tackled the heart needle before anything else.

They opened his chest through the breastbone and, guided by an ultrasound probe passed down his throat, pulled the needle out of his heart wall in one piece.

Recovery was rough.

Within a week, his heart's pumping strength dropped to 45 percent, a bulge had formed near the tip of the left ventricle, and doctors suspected a blood clot on the heart wall.

He went home nine days after surgery anyway.

Nine months later, his heart function had climbed back to 57 percent and he was stable.

The needles in his pelvis, bladder, and penis are still there.

Pulling those out could do more harm than good, so doctors are keeping an eye on them instead.

An Ohio Hospital Documented Self-Embedding in Teenagers Back in 2011

Cases like this are extremely rare, but American doctors started sounding the alarm on self-embedding years ago.

Over a three-year stretch, radiologists at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, identified 11 young patients who were self-embedding, and their 2011 report in Pediatrics found every one had a psychiatric diagnosis.

The hospital's radiologists were pulling metal, glass, wood, and even crayon out of arms, wrists, ankles, and lower legs.

Dr. William Shiels, who led that research, urged doctors to "rapidly pursue targeted intervention to interrupt the cycle of self-harm."

Those objects sat just under the skin, where a doctor could spot them.

This man had one in his heart, and it took a complaint about painful urination to find it.

The warning sign had been sitting in his medical history for two years, and this team finally read it.

If that shadow had gone unnoticed, his first heart symptom might have been his last.

Sources:

• Yingxin Ren et al., "Multi-organ needle foreign bodies with postoperative left ventricular apical outpouching and suspected mural thrombus: a case report," BMC Cardiovascular Disorders, September 7, 2026.
• McKenzie Beard, "Doctors find shocking 'foreign bodies' inside a man's chest, pelvis, bladder – and penis," New York Post, September 18, 2026.
• Nationwide Children's Hospital, "Self-embedding behavior and other forms of self-injury should be responded to quickly, experts urge," ScienceDaily, May 10, 2011.