An elderly gentleman sparked bomb threats after he arrived at an Accident and Emergency centre in Toulon, France, with a First World War artillery shell lodged in his anus.
The man arrived at the hospital on Saturday evening, Dec. 17.
One member of hospital staff told French news site VAR-Matin that the explosive object was something of a first.
"An apple, a mango or even a can of shaving foam," the hospital staff said, "we are used to finding unusual objects inserted where they shouldn't be. But a shell? Never!"
Once managers at the Sainte-Musse hospital realised what they were dealing with, they organised a partial evacuation of the nearby departments, particularly the children’s ward.
Hospital management confirmed that there had been "an emergency that occurred from 9pm to 11:30pm on Saturday evening that required the intervention of bomb disposal personnel, the evacuation of adult and pediatric emergencies as well as the diversion of incoming emergencies."
"We had to manage the risk in a reactive framework,” hospital administrator Yann Le Bras said. "When in doubt, we took all the precautions."
A hospital source said that the gynaecology and maternity wards carried on almost as usual during the bizarre "bomb threat" but the rest of the hospital closed down for the duration of the emergency.
Bomb disposal experts, who had been scrambled to the scene, determined that there was little possibility of an explosion.
"They reassured us by telling us that it was a collector’s item from the First World War, used by the French military".
As the object could not be safely retrieved "the way it went in," surgeons had to cut into the man's abdomen to remove it.
A statement from the hospital confirmed that the 88-year-old patient was in "good health" after the object, a projectile some "five or six centimetres in diameter by twenty long," was finally removed.
This isn't the first time a man has inserted a bomb in his butt. Back in Dec 2021, a man arrived Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, England with a World War 2 artillery shell as big as a hand stuck up his bum. He claimed he "slipped and fell" on the bomb.