UCLA

Foreign body ingestion encompasses a broad variety of ingested objects, clinical presentations, and treatment approaches, with a wide spectrum of severity and urgency. Herein, we describe the case of a 29-year-old man presenting with abdominal pain following the ingestion of empty plastic bags. Monitoring with serial imaging demonstrated the bags in the stomach 18 hours post-ingestion. Given this finding and worsening pain, a multidisciplinary decision was made to pursue endoscopic retrieval. This case uniquely demonstrates the benefit of rapid multidisciplinary meetings in an emergency room setting leading to the successful removal of ingested bags from the gastric body. While the phenomenon of "body stuffing," or hasty ingestion of bagged drugs to evade law enforcement has become common, there are few reports of endoscopic removal for such cases or those involving empty bag ingestion. This case highlights the importance of repeat abdominal imaging and early endoscopic intervention for foreign objects such as bags as they may be difficult to visualize on imaging, making it unreliable to track their progress. Dynamic imaging should be obtained, with computed tomography (CT) being the gold standard. This report represents the first case of empty bag ingestion, highlighting tenets of timely multidisciplinary management and considerations in endoscopic retrieval as a minimally invasive technique when a patient presents in the emergency department following bag ingestion.