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A 72-year-old French woman punctured her small intestine after accidentally swallowing a Christmas cake decoration.

According to a case report, the woman went to the hospital after suffering pain around her belly button for three days. Study authors wrote that the woman had vomited once and had a 100 °C (38°C) and felt tenderness on the right side of her abdomen.

CT scans revealed a 2cm-long axe-shaped foreign object perforating part of the woman's duodenum, the top part of the small intestine, according to the Daily Mail.

Doctors at Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris were able to remove the Christmas cake decoration. Doctors repaired the woman's perforation with sutures, and she was released from hospital 10 days later.

According to the report, the woman said that the tiny axe had been a decoration on the Christmas cake she ate seven days earlier.

The case study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.