With the coronavirus threat still, Joey Lykins approached his nearest pneumonia health center and found a treasure he thought he had lost. The 35-year-old American, addicted to piercings, surprised the doctors on duty who discovered the reason for his sudden respiratory problem: stuck in his left lung, they found the nose piercing he had lost five years ago.
“The doctor said he won the ‘best case of the night,'” Lykins said of the unusual experience that caught the attention of American doctors and reached the international press. “I’ve never heard of this happening before.”
Lykins’ breathing journey began five years ago after the Cincinnati native, who has 12 body piercings, woke up one day without a nose ring. “I woke up and my septum piercing was gone and I couldn’t find it anywhere,” he described. “I thought maybe I had swallowed it. I looked everywhere. I turned the bed. I’ve done all”.
After failing to find the missing metal horseshoe, Lykins gave up and replaced the nose piece with a new one. The gardener by vocation forgot his lost accessory, letting five years go by without thinking twice. That was until a few weeks ago when he woke up at 2:30 am “coughing very hard”.
“I was coughing so hard it was starting to hurt my back,” he described to local media. “I felt like something was blocking my airways and I thought I was sick.” So, thinking he had pneumonia or another respiratory condition, Lykins showed up at the Ohio hospital for examination.
The results took his breath away: subsequent x-rays revealed that the missing nosepiece was inexplicably lodged in the upper lobe of the left lung. “The doctor came in and showed me the X-ray image and said, ‘Does it look familiar?'” He recalled in amazement. “I was like, ‘You’re kidding me! I was looking for him, ‘”he added.
Lykins believes the ring fell off his nose while he was sleeping and then traveled down the windpipe and ended up in his lung. However, he found his affliction particularly difficult to understand, as his accidental pulmonary ring didn’t cause him any problems until recently. “I coughed, but I never thought about it too much,” Lykins explained, adding that he was glad the accessory didn’t pierce his lung.
“I don’t know if it could have caused any damage, but it was wrapped in scar tissue, so it didn’t look like it was going anywhere,” she said. However, the patient was referred to a specialist three days later for surgery. He underwent a bronchoscopy, in which doctors ran a thin tube down his throat and lungs so he could retrieve his buried treasure.
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