When one man couldn’t stop coughing up yellow mucus, doctors feared for the worst. After an X-ray showed what looked like a tumor, they thought 47-year-old Paul Baxter, a smoker who had recently had pneumonia, had lung cancer.
However, upon closer examination, the dark mass in the X-ray turned out to be a toy Playmobil cone that Baxter had received 40 years ago for his seventh birthday.
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“The doctor went in with the camera to start with, and he says ‘I can see something,’ ” the mail worker told the BBC, as reported by the local Manchester Evening News, “and he has little pincers on the end of his camera.”
“He says ‘I can’t reach it with these, but there’s something definitely there. It’s orange. I can’t grab it. You’re going to have to come back and we’ll do it again and I’ll use a longer one.”
So Baxter went back to the hospital in Manchester, where doctors used a longer probe to remove the object.
“We were watching it on the screen and nobody could tell what it was, and it was that little thing that came out of my mouth,” he said.
“And everybody just fell about laughing.”
Baxter explained that although he didn’t recall how it happened, he must have inhaled the 1-centimeter long toy at some point as a kid. “I don’t remember eating them,” he said, “But obviously I’ve had it in my mouth, and like the doctor said, I’ve inhaled it. Because normally if you swallow it goes down the other pipe and passes through you.”
Doctors reported their findings, which they called “unusual,” in the British Medical Journal.
“While it is a common occurrence for children to accidentally inhale small objects,” they wrote, “a case in which the onset of symptoms occurs so long after initial aspiration is unheard of.”
So how did the toy stay “hidden” inside Baxter’s lung for 40 years? Doctors say his youth and developing respiratory system may have had something to do with it.
“This may be because aspiration occurred at such a young age that the patient’s airway was able to remodel and adapt to the presence of this foreign body,” the report said.
Doctors also added that it was possible the object could have been absorbed into the lining of the lung, which may have actually developed around it.
Baxton’s case was the first ever reported of a tracheobronchial foreign body that was overlooked for 40 years.
Four months after doctors removed the toy traffic cone from Baxter’s lungs, his cough has almost completely disappeared and his symptoms have improved immensely, The Guardian reports.
He says he’s going to keep the toy cone as a memento and give it to his grandchildren — while keeping a close eye on them, of course.
