Paul Baxter was 47 years old when he visited a respiratory clinic complaining of coughing up yellow mucus. He had been feeling ill for more than a year. Two months prior to his visit, he had been diagnosed with pneumonia, but his symptoms had cleared up after a course of antibiotics. As a long-time smoker, when a chest x-ray showed a mass on his lungs, doctors suspected the worst: a tumor.
To confirm their suspicions, doctors used a bronchoscope, a flexible viewing tube inserted into the patient’s airway to explore. The first probe proved too short to reach the mass, but doctors could see that it was orange. They later used a longer bronchoscope with attached forceps to remove the unidentified object. But rather than a tumor, they’d extracted a tiny orange traffic cone, part of a Playmobil toy set Baxter said he’d received for his seventh birthday.
The cone was about one centimeter long. Baxter says the medical team had a good laugh at their unexpected discovery. But they also wrote up a case study in The BMJ because they believed it was the longest a foreign body had gone undiscovered in the throat and lungs.
Children typically show choking signs after inhaling something, but if the object isn’t found, symptoms can appear similar to recurrent croup (an upper respiratory infection with cough) and asthma. It can lead to actual pneumonia and damage the lungs. In adults, aspirated objects can look like tumors, like in Baxter’s case.