Woman With asthma inhales earring

It’s never a good thing when your New year’s eve activities are described by doctors as a cautionary tale — something a 41-year-old Australian would learn the hard way one fateful night in 2014.

As she prepared for a night of revelry, the asthmatic woman felt a tightness in her chest that prompted her to reach into her handbag for her inhaler. She heard an odd rattling sound as she picked it up, according to Livescience, but assumed it was a loose connection in the device.

She inhaled deeply and immediately felt a sharp pain at the back of her throat. She began wheezing and coughing up blood as she was rushed to the nearest emergency room.

She would soon learn the error of her ways, according to Lucinda Blake, a core medical trainee at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney and the lead author of the woman’s case study. “unfortunately, she was not taught to replace the cap on the inhaler after she has used it,” Blake said. “While her inhaler was uncapped in her bag, an earring that was also loose in her bag found its way into the inhaler and became lodged in it.”

While her perplexed patient assumed a small piece of tin foil from her bag might be the culprit, a chest X-ray revealed that a heart-shaped stud earring was currently accessorizing her right bronchus — one of two main airways leading from the windpipe into the lungs. doctors used antibiotics to combat any infection before removing the buried treasure via a bronchoscopy — a procedure that employs a thin, flexible tool with a camera to remove unwanted objects.

Large amounts of mucus had already begun to surround the earring. Had they waited any longer, Blake said the jewelry may have become a permanent resident of the woman’s body.