Vinson Louis Gonzaga Fernandes & Usama F. Kamel
Introduction: We describe an impacted plastic Electrocardiogram (ECG) sticker liner foreign body (FB) in the hypopharynx of a 23 years old healthy gentleman. The patient had no recollection of ingesting the foreign body during his hospital stay a year earlier for undergoing a sigmoidoscopy under general anaesthetic. He remembered an ECG tracing been performed on him prior to and after his sigmoidoscopy for cardiac monitoring. Case presentation: The patient presented to emergency clinic with odynophagia, haemoptysis and weight loss for 1 year. Clinical examination including flexible nasendoscopy and laryngoscopy revealed findings which were suspicious for a malignancy. Radiological investigations revealed inflammatory changes in the hypopharynx with no evidence of any radio opaque foreign body. The patient then underwent a rigid pharyngo-oesophagoscopy which revealed a plastic radiolucent hospital acquired foreign body which was successfully removed. There was no evidence of pharyngeal or oesophageal perforation. Discussion: Long standing foreign bodies in the upper aerodigestive tract may cause penetration and extraluminal migration of the ingested foreign body. This may cause severe vascular and/or suppurative complications, occasionally death may occur. This case highlights a very rare scenario for a mentally able adult patient to inadvertently ingest a plastic ECG sticker liner following an ECG tracing. To our knowledge this is the first case report of a hospital acquired foreign body lodged in the hypopharynx to be retrieved a year later in a healthy mentally able patient. In this presentation, we aim to emphasise the importance of a high clinical suspicion of a hospital acquired foreign body as well as the need for medical devices to be radio-labelled so as to allow for an early radiological detection.
