A 22-year-old man from Wisconsin who started experiencing coughing and heavy wheezing after an epileptic seizure was shocked to find that his silver grillz had become stuck in one of his lungs.

A case study recently published in the Cureus Medical Journal tells the story of an unnamed 22-year-old man who, after recovering from an epileptic seizure, started experiencing severe coughing and heavy wheezing. He immediately thought medical assistance and X-ray scans revealed that he had something lodged in the right main stem bronchus, an airway to his lung. This 4-cm-long mass looked like dentures, and the man told doctors that he was wearing his silver-plated grillz when he had the seizure, and he couldn’t find them when he recovered.

Photo: LexScope/Unsplash

The patient was scheduled for a bronchoscopy to have the object removed. A bronchoscope was inserted down the airway to dislodge the dental accessory. The patient experienced bronchospasm – where muscles in the lung airway tighten – from the operation and was given steroid treatment before being discharged.

Had the silver-plated grillz gone down the other pipe, they would have passed through the esophagus and into the stomach, before being excreted, but this way, the dentures became stuck in one of his lung airways.

Photo: Cureus Medical Journal

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time we write about people swallowing weird things. We previously wrote about a woman who accidentally swallowed a 30-cm-long vomiting tube, a woman who swallowed a spoon, and about a man who swallowed his toothbrush.