As if we needed another reason to be scared about going to a dentist, it seems those terrifying drill bits can do more than bore through teeth, they can get lodged in your lungs.
Imagine going to a dentist for a routine procedure like getting a tooth filled, and then hearing that you might have to have part of your lung removed because of a dental drill bit. That’s exactly what happened to Tom Jozsi, a 60-year-old man from Illinois, this month. He was at the dentist getting a tooth filled, and the next thing he knows he is being told that he swallowed a drill bit. That would have been bad enough, considering that the sharp metal part could have pierced his intestines, but a CT scan later showed that he hadn’t swallowed the drill bit, he had inhaled it, and it was now lodged in his lung.