So deeply lodged in the man’s insides was the toy that doctors had to develop a new tool to get it out.

A man in Italy had a 23-inch-long adult toy lodged so far in his rectum that doctors had to invent a new tool to extract it, IFL Science is reporting. And of course, whenever there’s a medical breakthrough, even in a situation as embarrassing and uncomfortable as this, it will be written about in a dry medical journal.

Here’s what happened: a 31-year-old man presented himself to the emergency room and told staff there that he had lodged the 23-inch-long instrument, described by IFL Science as “girthy,” lodged inside him, and that he couldn’t remove it by hand. It had been stuck up there for 24 hours, but other than some slight abdominal discomfort, however, he was fine.

Endoscopist Dr Lorenzo Dioscoridi, writing in the British Medical Journal, says that his team tried all of the usual methods of removing a foreign object from the digestive system, including “a wire loop device that is otherwise used to remove polyps,” and the tried-and-true method of artificially inflating the size of the orifice and then removing the offending object with forceps.

Nothing worked, due to “the rigidity, the smoothness and the size of the object,” as Dioscoridi writes with all of the dry narrative and straightforwardness expected of an academic journal.

With the standard extraction procedures all failing, and wanting to avoid invasive surgery if at all possible, Dioscoridi and his team had to innovate. Using a stent tube and some medical wire, the team fashioned a sort of lasso. They then looped a bit of wire around the offending device and were able to slowly and cautiously extract it from the patient.

“We finally succeeded in the endoscopic extraction of the device, catching the distal edge of the [object] with this guidewire lasso.”

Dioscoridi then went on to suggest to his colleagues that, should they be presented with a similar situation in their own practice, they’ll have a new tool at their disposal.

“We suggest this new technique as a valid option to remove large foreign bodies from the colon and rectum when standard endoscopic methods for foreign body extraction fail.”

Though the subject is always good for a couple of giggles around the water cooler, the matter of foreign objects being lodged in human orifices is a serious problem for the medical community. It even has its own name: Colorectal Foreign Bodies.

As for the unnamed patient, he was able to return home the very same day as the extraction, and Dioscoridi reports that he suffered no long-term effects.

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