A patient at a Swedish psychiatric ward in Helsingborg, in the south of Sweden, recently died after swallowing two surgical implements while visiting the Växjö hospital Centrallasarettet.
The woman, who has a history of swallowing sharp implements such as razorblades and knives, had been treated for several years at the open clinic in Helsingborg.
During what appears to be a mystery visit to Växjö, the woman visited Centrallasarettet where she reportedly got hold of the two surgical implements.
When staff at the hospital found out what she had done, she was rushed into surgery, but when the surgeon tried to remove the second scalpel from the woman’s throat, it damaged her oesophagus and blood vessels in her throat so badly that she died on the operating table.
An alligator leapt out of the water and hit a man in the arm while he and his girlfriend’s dog were in a kayak on Triplet Lake in Casselberry, Florida.
Thomas Swiader was fishing in the lake last Wednesday when the alligator rammed his kayak, knocking the Yorkie named Buffy into the water. He caught the incident on his helmet camera.
“I had a line out at the time. I was just sitting’ there relaxing,” said Swiader.
“It happened so fast, I didn’t know what happened. It hit me so hard; it whacked me in the arm. My arm was throbbing. I’m surprised I didn’t go in the water,” said Swiader.
Swiader was able to grab Buffy’s leash and pull her back into the boat.
“I looked over and she was swimming in the water, so just immediately I grabbed the leash, pulled her back to me and threw her in the kayak and at that time she was pretty frightened,” he said.
Buffy was not injured. Swiader said he won’t forget what happened, and kayaking won’t be the same from now on.
“It definitely worries me because it happened and you can’t take that back. But I’m sure I’ll be back out there eventually,” he said.
Swiader said he called Florida Fish and Wildlife about the incident.
Florida Fish and Wildlife said the incident may have been caused due to mating season, but Swiader said he believes the gator was after Buffy.
A motorist felt a little foolish when he had to call Austrian police to report his car had been hijacked – by a goat.
Gunther Hauser was forced to brake as he drove trough the countryside in Radkersburg, Austria, after coming face to face with an escaped goat on a remote road.
As 45-year-old Hauser tried to chase the goat away, it doubled back and jumped into the car.
Despite the pleadings of Hauser, the goat refused to budge and it began eating his car seats.
He eventually walked to a local farm but was then chased off as a suspected burglar.
At his wits end, he finally called the police. They rounded up local farmhands to remove the ram and take him back to his nearby enclosure.
“I had to take a picture of the goat because my insurance company would never have believed me,” he said later.
A tiger that entered a homestead in Valparai, Tamil Nadu, India, and was gored by a cow died on Saturday morning.
A postmortem on Saturday evening linked its death to a bad meal the big cat had a few hours before it went to retrieve the remains of a previous kill it left behind two days ago in the cowshed.
The tiger, according to the postmortem report, had eaten a porcupine hours before attacking the cow.
Quills of the porcupine had pierced the tiger’s heart and intestine.
The tiger breathed its last at around 8am on Saturday inside the cage where it was kept after being given a tranquilizing shot late on Friday evening, according to Manampallai forest ranger officer Arokiaraj Xavier.
The medicines administered by veterinarian Dr N Kalaivanan, who had come from Mudumalai National Park in the Nilgiris on Friday evening to tranquilize the tiger, could not save the 10-year-old animal.
The attack of the cow and the internal injuries it suffered after eating the porcupine had left the tiger weak.
Throughout the day, the animal was confined to the cowshed of R Gnanasekaran, a resident of Periyar Nagar in Valparai.
The absence of a vet with expertise in the use of tranquilizers locally had delayed officials from providing proper treatment to the animal.
Forest officials did not dare to go anywhere near the injured animal to provide food, water or medicines fearing retaliation.
The aged animal, officials, said could not fight off the fatigue and the injuries.
At 1.30pm on Saturday, Kalaivanan returned to conduct the autopsy in the Manampally Forest Range Office premises in the presence of senior forest officials, World Wide Fund For Nature representatives Dr Ajay and Mohanraj and Valparai police inspector M Subramanian.
The autopsy revealed that one of the legs of the tiger was damaged in the attack by the cow.
Its nails were broken and blood stains found on the nail beds. There was a deep cut on the stomach which was caused by the sharp quills of the porcupine.
There were numerous cysts in the intestine and the lungs too were damaged.
Two quills had pierced its heart.
According to Kalaivanan, the tiger would have hunted and eaten a porcupine before moving to Gnanasekaran’s property.
The tiger was cremated in the presence of a large crowd.
Neighbors of an animal hoarder in Ohio called the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office to check on the man after they hadn’t seen him for a while.
A deputy investigated and found the man upstairs. He had been dead at least a couple weeks.
“I’ve been to a lot of bad situations since I’ve been here,” Lawrence County Dog Warden Benny Call said. “I believe this was the worst.”
The floor of the home was covered in trash, feces and urine. Call said the man lived alone and had about 50 dogs.
Some of the dogs had starved to death; others had taken extreme measures to survive.
“Some of his body had been eaten,” neighbor Charlie Jenkins said.
Some dogs were in such bad shape they had to be put down.
“It hurts when you see a dog like that,” Call said.
Eight dogs were taken back to the Lawrence County Dog Shelter in Ironton. The dog warden said his agency had tried to help with the man’s dogs, but the man always turned them away.
“He didn’t want our help,” Call said. “He’d just run us off if we went out there. He probably cared for the dogs, but he just got overwhelmed.”
Call said there are still a few dogs that lived in the home that haven’t been rounded up yet. Police also found several cats in a separate trailer on that property, some of which had died as well.
So far, authorities haven’t found any relatives to notify.
“He just wanted to be by himself all the time, just be with his dogs,” Jenkins said. “That was his life.”
A hamster spent the Easter break recovering with its English owners from the unusual ordeal of eating a Spider-Man magnet and becoming stuck to the metal bars of its cage.
Kate Meech and her four children returned to their Bugbrooke home last Thursday afternoon to find four month-old Smurf quite distressed, attached to the outside of its cage.
Kate said: “When I saw the small circular shape from inside her cheek I realised she was attached by a magnet. It took a bit of a tug to pull her away from it and then we had to keep her in a plastic box, for obvious reasons.
“She seemed to be fine so I thought she would just spit it out if she was left alone. But after checking on her for a few days I realised that, instead, her body started to push it out of her cheek, treating it as a foreign body. It made me feel quite queasy. We found the magnet and she just has a little graze on her cheek. But she’s back to her normal, loopy self.”
Mrs Meech said the magnet was understood to have come from the foot of her 10-year-old son Thomas’s toy Spider-Man figure.
She added: “I’ve warned the children to keep their toys away from the cage from now on.”
