Do You Like Going To The Dentist?

Case of a patient who accidentally swallowed a drill bit during a dental procedure.

60-year-old maintenance worker, Tom Jozsi, from Illinois was undergoing a filling procedure when he swallowed a part of the drill. The case report does not report the date of the accident or the identity of the dentist.

When the patient was asked how the incident occurred, Jozsi chucked and replied that he was at the dentist getting a tooth filling and the next thing he knew he had swallowed this tool. He also stated that he didn’t feel the drill bit going down. And all he felt was a cough. After speaking to a doctor at the hospital he was afraid that he may have to undergo major surgery. He said, “What happens if he can’t get it out? And really, the answer was part of my lung was going to have to get removed.”

The metal drill bit was lodged in the patient’s lung and the sharp edges of it were causing him to cough up blood. According to the pulmonologist, foreign objects in the lung usually require surgery to remove a part of the lung with the stuck object. Similarly, the foreign body was in the mouth, where there are aggressive and virulent bacteria. This bacteria can cause abscesses, therefore, the foreign objects should be removed as soon as possible.

For further evaluation, doctors advised a CAT scan which showed how deep the drill bit was. According to pulmonary expert, Dr Abdul Airaiyes, the doctor who operated on Joszi and the Aurora Medical Center-Kenosha, the drill bit was far down in the lower right lobe of his lung. This meant that the drill bit could not have been removed using an endoscope. Therefore, the doctor tried a different device that is used for detecting early-stage cancers to remove the foreign object. He believed that the size of the catheter tube was thin enough for extracting the drill piece.

Doctors recorded the extraction on video. Footage shows that the team of doctors carefully manoeuvred through the narrow airways reached the drill bit and removed it without damaging the patient’s lungs. “I was never so happy in my life when I opened my eyes and I saw him with a smile under that mask, shaking a little plastic container that had the tool in it,” said Joszi. He now keeps the drill as a memento on a shelf at his home.

https://journal.medizzy.com/drill-bit-ends-up-in-patients-lung-during-a-dental-procedure/

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