Shocking find in woman's lung after suffering from chronic cough
A woman who visited a number of specialists to try to get to the bottom of what was causing her chronic cough has been told the cause was a pin in her lung.
Nazmiye Sakalloglu, from Karabuk Province on northern Turkey’s Black Sea coast, had been repeatedly told by doctors she was suffering from an allergy.
She went to see doctors in the country’s biggest city of Istanbul and the capital city of Ankara as well as the nearby cities of Karabuk and Cankiri without any joy.
Then she finally went to the Kastamonu State Hospital where an X-ray pinpointed the cause of her terrible cough – a three-centimetre pin in her left lung.
Ms Sakalloglu then remembered losing a pin, which she had been holding between her teeth, while fastening a scarf two years earlier.
She suspected she must have swallowed it at the time and drank glasses of water in a bid to flush it through her system.
But it turned out the pin had gone down the ‘wrong way’ – going down her windpipe and entering her left lung where it had remained ever since.
Surgeon Dr Tarik Yagci managed to remove the pin without the need for surgery by putting a tube down her throat and into her lung in a 90-minute bronchoscopy.
“I was holding two pins in my mouth while trying to fix my scarf and a third one was in my hand. Then I realised I had lost one,” Ms Sakalloglu said.
She said she had suspected she had swallowed it and had drunk lots of water, but had then forgotten about it after her coughing started.
Ms Sakalloglu spent two years visiting doctors in Ankara, Istanbul, Karabuk and Cankiri.
“All the doctors were telling me the cough was due to an allergy. They were giving me allergy medicines and sending me back home,” she said.
“I came once again to the state hospital. They made an X-ray and saw the pin. The surgery was very good. Now I feel much better. I don’t cough anymore.”
Ms Sakalloglu said she also had some advice for women who wore scarves.
“I suggest that if they fasten them with pins, they don’t put the pins in their mouth,” she said.
Dr Yagci said “foreign bodies stuck in the lungs can cause life-threatening situations such as chronic lung infections, pneumonitis and blood phlegms”.
“They are mostly encountered in children. But even though we rarely encounter such cases in adults, they must be removed,” the doctor said.
“The process was completed without any complications and our patient has regained her health.”
Back in 2018, reports emerged of a woman who accidentally swallowed her toothbrush and had to be rushed to hospital.
– Australscope
