Surgeon sheds light on unusual sneezing case
ONE of the doctors in the care team of a man who blew a hole in his throat trying to stifle a sneeze says the injury was sheer bad luck.
Leicester University Hospitals senior head and neck surgery registrar Bindy Sahota said he had only ever seen two cases of a ruptured pharynx in his 12 years as a medic.
The patient’s plight hit the headlines recently following publication of the incident in the BMJ Case Reports Journal.
Mr Sahota and a colleague penned the article to draw attention to the rare outcome of a held-in sneeze.
The registrar said the man had pinched his nose and kept his mouth shut to try and stop the powerful outburst.
Mr Sahota told sister paper the Leicester Mercury: “It’s not a good idea to try to hold a sneeze in but we’ve all done it - perhaps because we have been at work and needed to be quiet or we just didn’t want to make a mess.
“Most of us are fine but for this guy it was just sheer bad luck. It has been described as a rupture but we are actually talking about a really small hole - at most a couple of millimetres.
“It was still enough to make his voice very dysphonic - growly and hoarse and he was in some considerable discomfort because air had escaped into parts of his body where it shouldn’t have been and was causing problems.
Mr Sahota, who has been a doctor since 2005, said: “There are two options to treat this kind of injury.
“There’s surgery but actually finding the hole is a challenge and then there is conservative management which is essentially allowing it to heal.
“We by-passed the area by putting a feeding tube into his stomach and then we gave him antibiotics because infection was the biggest risk here and the mouth is the dirtiest bit of the body.”
Mr Sahota said the patient, who presented himself at Christmas 2016, spent seven days in hospital.
He added: “Generally the throat is an area that heals quite well.
“We gave him dye and x-rays showed it wasn’t spreading to areas the air had been getting to so we knew he had healed.
“He made a full recovery and within four weeks he was back at work though we are now going to send him for checks on his lining tissue.”