Who knew soup could be dangerous? One Thai woman found out the hard way—when a fish bone from her dinner ended up stabbing through the skin of her neck.
In Thailand, a woman named Sang Lan was eating a homemade dish made with Pla Kayaeng (a type of catfish) and Pla Lod (an eel-like fish notorious for its thin, sharp bones) when she felt something jab at her throat. She’d swallowed a fish bone. Painful, but not unusual. Like most people, she assumed it would work itself out.
It didn’t.
She tried rice and bread crusts—folk remedies meant to push stuck bones down. Still in pain, she went to the hospital. But after an X-ray showed nothing unusual, doctors sent her home. She kept living with the pain, thinking maybe it was healing. Then, her neck started swelling. Never a good sign.
Two weeks after the meal, while pressing on the swollen area, she felt something hard under the skin. One press of her finger and it started poking through, white and sharp as a needle.
Images of the incident, originally posted online by her husband (now removed) and now circulating in Thai media, show a needle-like spike breaking through the skin just below her jaw. Surgeons later removed a 2-centimeter fish bone lodged in the muscle tissue of her neck. Her case baffled the medical team.
According to her husband, it was her repeated pressing on the site that may have helped the bone burrow even deeper—until it finally forced its way out.
She’d seen two doctors, had two X-rays, and still, no one caught it. The pain was real, but the cause kept getting misdiagnosed. First dismissed as irritation. Then, possibly a thyroid issue. It wasn’t until it visibly broke through the skin that anyone took it seriously.
The couple says they won’t be eating fish again anytime soon.
Fish bones are among the most common objects swallowed accidentally, but cases like this—where the bone travels through soft tissue and emerges externally—are almost unheard of. If there’s a lesson here, it’s probably this: if you feel something sharp lodged in your throat and it doesn’t go away, don’t just wait it out. That “minor discomfort” might be trying to stab its way out of your body.
