A Saudi man had to undergo laparoscopic surgery to unblock his airway after he accidentally swallowed his car key while playing with it.

A medical team at a hospital in Saudi Arabia’s coastal Al Qunfudah governorate has been praised for saving a man’s life by extracting his car key from his respiratory tract. Just how the 49-year-old man managed to swallow his own car key is still unclear, but most Middle Eastern news sources claim that he was ‘playing’ with it. That doesn’t really explain much as we can’t even begin to picture how he was playing with the car key if he ended up swallowing it, but the important thing is that the driver didn’t choke to death and even managed to recover his car key.

Source: Sabq

According to Gulf News, the 49-year-old man was admitted to the hospital’s emergency room, where staff noticed he had trouble breathing. X-ray examinations showed a car key inside the respiratory passage, and the patient told doctors that he had accidentally swallowed it while playing with it. It was decided that an endoscopy to remove the key and clear the blockage of the airways was the best course of action, but the fact that the man was a heart patient made the procedure a lot more complicated.

Luckily, the laparoscopic surgery was successful, and the car key was recovered. The patient was hospitalized for a few days to ensure that there were no complications, but he has probably left the hospital by now, most likely in his own car…

In the past, we wrote about people who accidentally swallowed their toothbrushes and even their grillz, but this is the first time we hear about someone swallowing their car keys.