It Certainly Wasn't A Bick

An unidentified 76-year-old woman has had a pen inside her stomach for the past 25 years, according to a report in the British Medical Journal. Doctors at a hospital in Exeter, England, recently and surgically removed it.
The patient told her doctors that 25 years ago, she was using the pen to inspect a spot on her tonsils when she slipped, fell and accidentally swallowed the pen. Her husband, who was a doctor, didn’t believe her story, so he took an x-ray and then apparently believed her even less because nothing showed up in the x-ray.
Unable to prove her story, the woman went about her business with the pen in her stomach.  She had no symptoms that the pen was causing any trouble until recently when she started losing weight and experiencing other intestinal disturbances we need not mention.  Subsequent tests revealed the pen.
By the way, it was a felt tipped pen.
When surgeons got the pen out of the woman's stomach, they found that it still wrote clearly.  They said it was pretty amazing for a felt tipped pen to write after all of those years.
I'm not even going to try and guess why the surgeons tried writing with the pen.  Even more than the pen writing is the fact that they tried writing with it.
Here's what I find fascinating about this whole thing.

Pen Inside Woman's Stomach

I can't even keep a pen in my pocket or on my desk for more than five minutes.  They just disappear on me though, thankfully not in me.  I used to have a coffee cup on my desk full of pens but they just disappeared and those that remained in the cup wouldn't write.
So naturally I'm kind of bummed that this woman knew exactly -- for twenty-five-years -- the location of her pen.  And then, of course, it just doesn't seem fair that the thing still wrote perfectly once removed from the woman's stomach.
Of course, I don't envy the woman's ability to keep track of her writing implements enough to swallow a pen because, trust me, I'd never see the pen again.  It would somehow get lost.  And even if surgeons eventually found it, trust me more.  It wouldn't write.