French man rushes to the hospital with a WWI artillery shell stuck in rectum; bomb squad called amid fear of detonation

People end up in the ER for all kinds of wild reasons. Some of them make you pause and go, “Wait… how did that even happen?” This one definitely falls into that category.

WW1 bullet for pleasure?

Doctors at a hospital in Toulouse, France, had their jaws on the floor earlier this year when a 24-year-old man came in with intense pain and said there was “an object” stuck inside him. He didn’t really explain why or how it got there. He just knew something was very wrong.

So they took him in for surgery.

That’s when things went from awkward to straight-up unbelievable. The doctors realised the object wasn’t just any random thing. It was a World War I artillery shell. Yes, an actual shell. Big too. We’re talking around 16 cm long and about 4 cm wide. From 1918.

And suddenly, this wasn’t just a medical emergency anymore. It was a safety nightmare.

A hospital patient’s emergency case called for bomb squad!

But here’s the scary part. No one knew if the shell was live or harmless. So the hospital did the only sensible thing. They cleared the area and called in the bomb squad and firefighters in the middle of the night. Imagine showing up for your hospital shift and finding out there’s a possible WW1 shell inside a patient. That’s not in the job description.

The surgeon stopped the procedure until experts could check the object. Luckily, the bomb squad confirmed it wasn’t going to explode. Once they made it safe, doctors were able to remove it without anyone getting hurt. The man recovered, and no charges were filed. The ER evacuated from 9 pm to 11:30 pm Saturday, diverting patients, as a spokesperson told Var-Matin: "An emergency occurred... that required the intervention of bomb disposal personnel."


The bomb squad deemed it a harmless collector's item, “They reassured us by telling us that it was a collector’s item from the First World War, used by the French military,” and he recovered fully. "As a precautionary measure, firefighters are mobilized to reinforce in order to prevent any risk of fire during the intervention," La Dépêche added. The shell was decommissioned, allowing safe removal, police opened a probe for Category A ammo possession, though no charges followed.

And if you’re thinking, “This can’t be real life,” here’s the kicker. This isn’t even the first time something like this has happened in France.

Back in 2022, another hospital had to be evacuated when an elderly man turned up with a World War I shell lodged in the same place. Bomb squad, emergency shutdown, patients diverted. The whole deal. In that case too, it turned out to be an old collector’s item and not dangerous.

So yes. People collect these things. And somehow, some of them end up making truly baffling choices with them.

More about such artillary shells

Shells like the one lodged in the man's rectum were fired by the Imperial German Army during World War I. Between 1914 and 1918, they launched hundreds of thousands against British and French forces on the Western Front.

And it’s not like these old shells are rare. France still digs up thousands of unexploded bombs and shells from World War I and II every year during what they call the “Iron Harvest.” Farmers find them in fields. Construction workers hit them while digging. History is literally still buried in the ground over there.

But finding one in a hospital operating room? Inside a patient?

That’s a whole different level of “How did we get here?”