Tooth and Nail

Easy way out for tooth and nail
A STAFF REPORTER

A toddler and an aged woman have got a new lease of life following a non-surgical procedure that extracted the foreign bodies they had unknowingly swallowed.

Sagnik Laha, 2, swallowed a 5cm-long iron nail he was playing with at his Chandernagore home on December 20. “My son got hold of the nail while carpenters were working in our house,” said father Sukanta, a trader.

“Suddenly we found the nail was gone. When we asked Sagnik he pointed at his throat,” recalled mother Saraswati.

An X-ray revealed that the nail was stuck in the small intestine.

“The nail was lodged in the third part of the duodenum, a curved area around the pancreas and in front of the aorta, the largest blood vessel of the body. Even a slight movement could have led to the puncture of the internal structures and bleeding,” said gastroenterologist Mahesh Goenka, who performed an endoscopy on the boy at Apollo Gleneagles Hospitals, Calcutta, to extract the nail.

“The endoscope was protected with a tube to ensure that the nail did not damage the intestinal walls while being taken out,” said Goenka, the director of the Institute of Gastroenterology at the hospital. The boy was released from the hospital a couple of days later.

Around the same time as Sagnik had swallowed the nail, a 77-year-old woman who refused to be named swallowed a denture. “She was suffering from abdominal pain. A colonoscopy was performed and the nail was taken out through the rectum. The procedure lasted 45 minutes,” said Goenka.

A doctor said that earlier such extraction would have been impossible without surgery.


The lower dentures are normally very unstable since they do not have the same area of support as the upper dentures.
Some years back one of my colleagues too had swallowed his dentures (two or three teeth) when he was drinking water. Fortunately the doctors could remove doctors without nay major damage.
I am sure the above procedures would be helpful for such accidents.
Science has been beneficial to mankind.
However, what happened before these procedures were developed?
I'll relate an incident which occurred in Burrabazar many years ago.

A servant in our neighbour's house had stolen a diamond nose pin.
The house lady guessed it and asked the servant but the servant cunningly swallowed the nose pin.
The house lady was very resourceful.
She made the servant eat raw bananas and locked him in a room for the whole night.
The next morning she made him relieve himself in the room itself on some newspapers.
Then she made him spread the faeces and lo and behold, the diamond nose pin was there.

You could try this procedure.
It is less expensive