PAIN IN THE NECK

Cap of a cold drink bottle worthRs 10 costs a man Rs 2 lakh Dhaval Patani has trouble chewing food, so he oftenswallows it. One day he gulped down the cap unknowingly and carried it in histhroat for 9 months. Surgeons took 5 hours to remove it

Dhaval Patani from Kutch reeled from chest and back pain for 15 days. This forced him to approach a doctor who asked him to take an x-ray image.

The 44-year-old businessman got the shock of his life when it showed cap of a cold drink bottle embedded in the side wall of this food pipe.

Surprisingly, he had unknowingly carried the metallic foreign body inside him for nine-and a-half months.

There is a curious story behind how the cap got inside his body. According to Patani, he went out with his family for lunch sometime in June 2014. Due to dental problem, he is unable to chew food properly, so normally he gulps it.

“While having food, I left something went inside my throat. I thought it was my imagination. But from the next day I started getting pain in my throat. Now I know there was a cap in my food which I unknowingly gulped down,“ said Patani.

Not sure of what was wrong, he underwent treatment for the pain in the neck for three months. He also developed other health issues like acidity, gastric and indigestion.

Though the cap was embedded in the side wall of his throat, he did not have any problem having food. “I used to eat everything and didn't have any problems in swallowing them. Whenever I felt that here was something inside my throat, I dismissed it as my imagination,“ said Patani.

“I never thought that the cap of a cold drink bottle worth Rs 10 would cost me Rs 2 lakh in surgery,“ he said.

On March 25, he and his family got the shock of their lives when he got his x-ray image. They took him to the best of the doctors in the city to get it removed. But no one agreed as it was a very a complicated procedure.

Finally a team of gastroenterologist Sanjay Rajput and cardio-vascular and thoracic surgeon Tushar Shah from SAL Hospital operated upon him on April 2, 2015. The procedure lasted for five hours. The foreign body had led to the development of pus.

“It was a very complicated procedure as the cap was stuck on the inside wall of the throat, which was tough to remove. Just removing the cap took more than four hours.Then we had to put it outside his throat, which took another hour,“ Dr Shah told Mirror.

“The opening of food pipe to remove the foreign body in presence of pus within its wall could have been a risky and potentially life threatening procedure,“ he added.

Foreign body presence in food pipe is common in children. While coins are common among them, fish bones and dentures are common among adults.

“But it is uncommon to find a bottle cap inside an adult. It needed many ingenious and indigenous techniques to disimpact and remove the cap. The role of anaesthesia team was also very critical,“ said Dr Shah.