12-year-old Kolkata boy had persistent cough, doctors find a pen cap in his lung

New Delhi: A 12-year-old Kolkata boy was brought to the hospital after he complained of severe cough. Doctors suspected there must be some foreign body inside his lungs and a CT scan was done. By foreign body, the doctors didn’t anticipate what they found in the scan: a pan cap. The boy’s family members said that he had swallowed a pen cap in November.

The condition of the boy is stable after the surgery that was conducted on Thursday.

The boy, a resident of Garia in the southern fringes of Kolkata, was brought to the Seth Sukhlal Karnani Memorial or SSKM Hospital with persistent cough and cold problems, said Dr Arunabha Sengupta, head of the ENT department at the SSKM Hospital.

He was taken to a local nursing home when he swallowed a pen cap. The doctors there didn’t believe that he had actually swallowed a pen cap. They said he would have been dead.

Since that time, the child was suffering from cough and cold.

“After the CT scan revealed that a pen cap was inside his left lung, a bronchoscopy was done on Thursday and it was removed. He is stable and out of danger,” Dr Sengupta said.