The patient had been walking around with the 20cm (8in) lump of metal in his gut since undergoing an operation in the city of Shakhtinsk 13 years ago, the Novy Vestnik newspaper reports . A surgeon had forgotten to remove the clamp during an abdominal operation, but the man noticed nothing until this summer, when his wife sent him to the local clinic after he went off his food.

Doctors were initially at a loss to explain his symptoms, until they tried an X-ray scan. "I've never seen anything like it - at least not lasting this long," says radiologist Baurzhan Aibayev. "Foreign objects usually cause some sort of medical problem, but in this case he felt nothing for more than 12 years!" The Kazakh Medical and Pharmaceutical Oversight Committee tells Novy Vestnik that it won't take any steps against the absent-minded surgeon, as no one has filed a complaint, a decision echoed by the hospital in question. The patient himself is to undergo another operation to remove the wayward clamp. "It's difficult to imagine someone who's about to go under the knife picking a fight with the doctors," the paper concludes.