Any parent will tell you, kids will be kids!
One of the things that stresses me out the most about my kids is watching them put things in their mouths any chance they get. Not only is it pretty gross, but I live in constant fear that one day they’ll choke on something while my back’s turned. Sadly, we can’t always have our eyes on our children, so we just have to accept that sometimes they’ll do things that we absolutely don’t want them to.
Someone who knows this well is 50 year old father-of-two Paul Baxter.
He had been suffering with a nagging cough for over a year when he decided to finally go to the doctors.
But it was only when they did an x-ray of his lungs that doctors saw something terrifying.
Paul was 47 when he went to the doctors complaining of a nagging cough that had lasted for a year. Doctors did an x-ray on the father-of-two’s lungs, and saw something terrifying.
Doctors saw what they thought was a tumor on one of Paul’s lungs. As Paul is a heavy smoker, they were extremely worried.
However, it wasn’t until Paul was on the operating table that they discovered the truth: what looked like a tumor was actually an old toy traffic cone that Paul had swallowed when he was only seven years old.
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“Kids eat things and I obviously chewed on my toys, but I can’t even remember swallowing it to be honest,” Paul tells Metro.
“I have been told that I must have inhaled it for it to go into my windpipe. If I had swallowed it, it would have gone into my stomach and out the other end.”
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Paul, who had the toy removed a full 40 years after he swallowed it, describes the moment that surgeons removed the toy:
“The operation was under local anaesthetic, and when they removed the cone in the theatre it was hilarious – everyone in the room just laughed,” he says, and continues:
“It has come out in perfect working order, you can even still see the markings.”
Although it’s hard to imagine how Paul lived for so long with a toy stuck in his lungs, doctors do have a theory of how the traffic cone went undetected. They say that because he inhaled the toy at a young age, “the patient’s airway was able to remodel and adapt to the presence of this foreign body.”
Watch Paul talk about the unexpected discovery below:
Unbelievable! It’s terrifying to think of the damage that could have been done from the toy lying so long in Paul’s lungs, but thankfully he is OK and has a pretty incredible story to tell.
Share this story with your friends if you also had to do a double take when you watched the clip!
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