One morning last July, 62-year-old Bengaluru resident Pramod Atani woke up with a terrible cough. He also realised, to his horror, that a three-tooth set from his dentures was missing.
As the day wore on, the coughing got persistent, but there was no sign of his dentures. Atani didn’t make the connection then — that he had not misplaced his dentures, but they had instead slipped down his airway while he had slept and wound up in his lungs.
What followed, according to Dr Satyanarayana Mysore from Manipal Hospitals, was a year of torment.
Atani came to believe that he was afflicted with cancer, and when that diagnosis failed he was convinced that he had tuberculosis; when that test too came back negative, he came to believe that he had a mystery ailment for which there was no medical diagnosis.
It was only recently, following a visit to an X-ray centre, that he was told about a strange growth in his left lung, which medical staff classified as a “foreign body”.
“The patient thought he had a malignant growth in his lung and based on X-ray scans, we went into the case fully believing the same thing,” said Dr Satyanarayana Mysore. “To our shock, we found that foreign body was instead a three-tooth set of dentures, with some silver in them.”
Just a few months ago, Dr Satyanarayana and his team had been confronted by another case of a patient swallowing dentures, although the incident had happened while the patient was at her dentist’s office.
Another person who categorically also refused to believe it was the patient himself until Dr Rai retrieved the denture following a bronchoscopy.
“The entire experience has put the patient off dentures. He is now going in for tooth implants instead,” Dr Rai said.