There have been several instances of doctors finding the most bizarre of items in people’s bodies — scissors lodged in the skull, a giant hairball from the stomach and gold biscuits in the rectum. Joining the odd list of foreign objects that clearly don’t belong in a human body — a lighter. That’s right, a cigarette lighter was recently recovered from a man’s stomach in China, local media said. It had been there for 20 years at least.

Last week, the man from Sichuan province went to see a doctor with complaints of stomach ache and blood in his stool. During an endoscopy of his stomach, doctors found a ‘long and black’ object in his stomach, reports the NDTV.

‘It measures about nine centimetres long (3.6 inches) and it’s shiny,’ the doctor told the man, Daily Mail quotes Jiangxi Network Television.

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It was only when doctors informed the patient that they suspected the object could be a lighter, that he recalled swallowing one by mistake - 20 years ago. The man told hospital staff the lighter never caused any symptoms until now, Shanghaiist quotes a local media outlet.

The man, believed to be in his forties, was ultimately taken into surgery and the object was removed from the man’s gut after a second operation. The doctors couldn’t retrieve the object in the first surgery because of its smooth surface. After bagging the lighter in the latex hood, in the second attempt that took only 10 minutes, doctors grabbed the object with forceps and guided it out through his oesophagus, Straits Times reported.

The lighter was found to be in a corroded state and unsurprisingly so, given the 20-year stay in the man’s stomach. Doctors said the situation could have been life-threatening if the lighter had travelled to the man’s intestines. Fortunately, the lighter that contains butane didn’t leak inside his belly.

The man is currently recovering in the hospital.