There are some living things out there that can thrive even in the darkest places. When completing a routine colonoscopy, doctors discovered that a fly was living in the patient’s intestines.
The American Journal of Gastroenterology published their case of a 63-year-old man who had a fly living in his colon. The man had a routine colon cancer screening and doctors at a Missouri hospital conducted a colonoscopy, which is a procedure that involves a camera being inserted into the intestines to check for anything out of the ordinary.
To the doctor’s surprise, they located an intact fly that had somehow survived the gastric acid and was just sitting inside the man’s large intestine. “This case represents a very rare colonoscopic finding,” doctors wrote in the American Journal of Gastroenterology. “It is a mystery how the intact fly found its way to the transverse colon.”
While it’s unclear as to how the fly ended up inside the man’s intestines, it’s common knowledge that fly larvae laid in fruits and vegetables can sometimes survive stomach acid and then hatch in the intestines. In this case, the patient had only consumed clear liquids the day before the colonoscopy and the day before he had eaten pizza and lettuce but didn’t remember seeing a fly in his food.