Doctors find toothbrush in woman's nose

Doctors at Sapna Health Care Hospital in Ghatkopar, who operated on a 31-year-old woman on Saturday, were shocked at what they saw lodged in her nose — a three-inch piece of a broken toothbrush!

The offending object had been lodged in the woman’s nasal cavity for two long months and had been causing her terrible pain.



So how did it get there? The woman claims she is not sure. She says, “Around two months ago as I was brushing my teeth, my husband accidentally pushed me and the toothbrush in my hand broke. I was left holding the lower portion of the brush but couldn’t locate the rest of it. Soon after, I started bleeding profusely from the nose,” she said. She visited the family doctor to stop the bleeding. “But since that day, I began getting breathless and a foul smelling discharge began to come out of my nose. I used to get restless gasping for breath sometimes,” she said.

Unable to take the discomfort anymore, the woman approached Dr Kaushal Sheth, an ENT surgeon, on October 8. He advised her to get an X-ray done. Dr Sheth said, “The odour from her nose was so bad that it could be smelt from a distance of two feet, yet I could see nothing on the X-ray. I immediately advised her to go for a CT scan.”



On October 12, the woman got the CT scan done and returned to the doctor. “The report showed a clear image of a horizontal object inside her nose. I advised her to get operated upon at the earliest because if the object fell into her windpipe, she could have choked to death,” Sheth added. The X-ray did not show anything as the object was plastic and plastic objects do not show up on X-rays.

According to the doctor, it is impossible that the toothbrush could have entered the nasal cavity through the mouth. The woman’s father-in-law said his son lived separately and used to often fight with his wife as he was jobless. However, the woman has given a statement to the police that the brush had entered her nose accidentally.