A Chinese man who felt something crawling up his nose one night experienced particularly bad breath for three days before discovering he had a cockroach stuck in his trachea.
A 58-year-old man in Haikou, China’s Hainan Province, recently experienced an entomophobe’s worst nightmare. One night, as he was sleeping, he woke up with a strange sensation that something was crawling up his nose. Then he felt something go down his throat, so he started coughing, but nothing came out so he just went back to sleep. The following day, he put the whole incident to the back of his mind and just went about his business until he realized he had particularly bad breath. Even after three days, his breath still smelled disgusting, and he also started coughing up yellow sputum, so he decided to seek medical help.
The unnamed man first went to an ENT specialist at Hainan Hospital, but an examination of the upper respiratory tract found nothing suspicious. However, the patient was convinced that there was something wrong, so he was deferred to Dr. Lin Ling, a respiratory and critical care physician at the hospital. He conducted a chest CT scan and found a shadow in the posterior basal segment of the right lower lobe, which indicated that a foreign object had become stuck there. The recommended course of action was a minimally invasive bronchoscopy.
“During the procedure, I clearly saw something with wings in the bronchus,” Dr. Lin said. “The foreign body was wrapped in a lot of phlegm. After sucking out the surrounding phlegm, the foreign body was exposed. It was a cockroach.”
After removing the bug from the man’s trachea, the area was repeatedly washed and cleaned of phlegm, so the bad smell emanating from it disappeared completely shortly after. The 58-year-old man made a full recovery and was discharged the next day.
Dr Lin Ling said that such bizarre cases are very rare, but advised anyone with reasons to believe that they have a foreign body stuck in their lower respiratory tract to seek medical attention as soon as possible.
