A little boy has has 12 steel nails removed from his stomach after he swallowed them whole.
Doctors were stunned by the 10-year-old's stunt after his classmates saw him swallowing the 3.5cm nails in school.
The 10-year-old, nicknamed Xiao Wen, is thought to suffer from a disorder known as 'pica', which is associated with eating non-nutritious substances such as hair, paper, stones, earth or metal.
The child who lives in Lianyuan, a city in Central China's Hunan Province, was taken to hospital for scans.
He is what China calls a "left-behind" child, who lives with his grandparents as his guardians while his parents work in other cities.
The boy was transferred to Hunan Children's Hospital in the provincial capital Changsha after his condition was found to be more serious than first feared.
Doctor Wen Jiabing said X-ray scans showed clearly the 12 nails inside Xiao Wen's stomach, and that they could have ruptured the boy's organs and caused serious internal bleeding if surgeons had not acted quickly.
Zhou Weiping, Xiao Wen's dad, was called from his workplace in China's southern Guangdong Province in order to sign off on what in the end was a successful round of invasive surgery to remove the sharp objects.
Xiao Wen had apparently found the dangerous nails lying around in the school playground.
But witness accounts from his class confirmed that he ate them himself, with his grandparents also saying that he had a tendency to eat paper - consistent with the pica disorder.
Xiao Wen is now recovering from his surgery, and doctors have urged his grandparents to keep a closer eye on him and on what he puts in his mouth.
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