- Are your lungs suddenly feeling itchy? Because ours sure are.
We’ve all inhaled something we’re not supposed to at one point or another. And you know how that usually ends — you cough your lungs out until the foreign object leaves your airways.
Sometimes, though, the intruder never leaves and we learn to live with it until doctors discover it years later. That’s when you realize just how bizarre the things people manage to inhale are.
Here is a small collection of some of the weirdest objects that have gotten stuck in peoples’ lungs.
Dentist’s Drill Bit
Tom Jozsi, a 60-year-old man from Illinois, was getting a tooth filled at a dentist’s office in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Suddenly, he coughed and the dentists stopped working on his chompers.
The dentist told Jozsi that he had just swallowed the drill bit from his tool. But when he got taken to a hospital and doctors gave him a CT scan, they found no tools in his stomach.
Instead, the drill bit was in his lung. That made recovering it much more difficult, and the doctors thought they might have to remove a part of Jozsi’s lungs.
Fortunately, Dr. Abdul Alraiyes managed to pull the drill bit out using a tool intended for early cancer detection.
“I was never so happy as when I opened my eyes, and I saw him with a smile under that mask shaking a little plastic container with the tool in it,” Jozsi recalled.
The drill bit now resides on a shelf in Jozsi’s home as a memento of his ordeal.
Toy Traffic Cone
Some 40 years ago, there was a small British boy who had a bad habit of sticking pieces of his Playmobil play set in his mouth. Fast-forward 40 years to 2017, and the boy — now a man — was seeking medical attention for pneumonia.
An X-ray of the man’s chest showed a strange lump in his right lung. Since the man had been a heavy smoker for 30 years, the doctors told him that he might have lung cancer.
But during a bronchoscopy, the doctors didn’t find a single sign of cancer in his airways. But they did find a small Playmobil traffic cone stuck in his airway.
Turns out, the man was now paying the price for his childhood habit. Fortunately, the doctors were able to remove the toy, and the man’s lung issues disappeared completely.
Condom
A 27-year-old Indian woman had been coughing up thick phlegm for a half year. Since she’d also been suffering from bouts of fever, doctors were worried she had tuberculosis.
Bizarrely enough, although her symptoms matched the disease, all tuberculosis tests came back negative. However, during a CT scan, the doctors noticed something unusual — a bag-like lesion in the upper right lobe of her lungs.
Could it be cancer? Luckily, no. When the doctors pulled it out, they discovered it was just a condom.
Turns out, the woman had been going down on her husband when the condom he was wearing came loose. The woman simultaneously started coughing intensely and… Well, you can figure out the rest.
The doctors also noted that was most likely the first medical case of its kind in medical literature. What an honor.
Live Fish
In 2012, an Indian boy named Anil Barela, 12, and his friends were playing by a river. Boys being boys, the youngsters started daring each other to swallow small live fish.
Anil was no chicken, and when his turn came out, he bravely popped the 3.5-inch-long fish into his mouth. But immediately afterward, he started coughing furiously and said he couldn’t breathe.
As you can probably guess, the fish had gone down the wrong pipe. Anil got rushed to the hospital, where doctors had no choice but to perform emergency surgery on him.
Some 45 minutes later, Anil and his family could all breathe a huge sign of relief. The doctors removed the fish, which was still alive and kicking.
“The fish was live and taking its last breath when the bronchoscopy was done, restricting the functioning of both the lungs resulting in low intake of oxygen,” said Dr. Pramod Jhawar, the surgeon who saved Anil’s life.
A Tree Seed that Sprouted
The previous cases have all definitely been bizarre, but they have nothing on this one. After all, whoever heard of a tree growing inside someone’s lungs.
But that’s what happened to Artyom Sidorkin, a 28-year-old man from Izhevsk, Russia. In 2009, he went to the hospital, complaining that he had chest pains and was coughing up blood.
The doctors were convinced Sidorkin had cancer, especially since X-rays showed a weird growth inside his lung. But when they cut Sidorkin open, they found a two-inch-long growing fir inside the lung.
“I thought I was hallucinating. I blinked three times as I was sure I was seeing things,” said surgeon Vladimir Kamashev.
Doctors believe Sidorkin had inhaled a fir seed that sprouted in his lungs since the twig was way too big to make its way to where they found it. We’re not sure how a tree could sprout without light inside a lung, but here we are.