A man from the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang in China showed up to hospital with severe abdominal and back pain, and a small medical mystery in tow. It was soon solved when his wife remembered that he had eaten a live crab in order to avenge his daughter.
Lu, 39, was found to have problems with his chest, liver, abdomen, and digestive system when he was admitted to hospital, the South China Morning Post reports. Doctors were confused, however, as there was no obvious cause for his distress.
“We repeatedly asked him if he had ever eaten game, or anything unusual, anything that could cause allergies," Dr Cao Qian, the director of the digestive system department at Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital in Hangzhou, told South China Morning Post. "He said no to all."
This was all cleared up when his wife mentioned that he had eaten a live crab a few months prior. Explaining the unusual incident to the doctor, he said that "I wanted to take revenge for my daughter," according to his doctors, adding "when we were by a stream my daughter was pinched by a small crab, so I got angry and put it into my mouth for revenge."
Leaving aside whether the punishment fits the crime, and a whole host of other questions about how you get so angry that you think the only course of action is to put a crab in your mouth, the incident was also not a great idea for medical reasons.
Others have been hospitalized after eating "drunken crab", a dish that (in some versions) sees live crabs marinated in alcohol before being eaten. The main danger of eating live crabs (if you escape perforation of some of your favorite digestive organs by the hard shells) is the parasites you can pick up, which would usually be dealt with through cooking.
Sure enough, blood tests showed that Lu's act of vengeance ended up infecting him with three different parasites. No update was given on the girl's finger or sense of whether justice had been restored.
