In a bizarre medical case, a teenager who had a loss of odor at the same time but radiated an unexplained “foul odor” when he blew his nose over a period of eight years discovered the culprit.
According to a recent report in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery, the boy first presented to doctors when he was 15 years old with a weakened sense of smell.
Doctors performed an endoscopy on the teen’s nose to determine the cause. They quickly noticed that the boy had a condition known as “turbinate hypertrophy,” in which the tubes in his nasal enlargement are enlarged, a condition often accompanied by allergies or inflammation in the sinuses.
The doctor prescribed nasal spray and a course of antihistamines to treat the seemingly everyday condition.
However, the teenager returned a year later, at the age of 16, with no noticeable improvement in his nasal symptoms. In fact, he started expelling “a sharp, foul odor [which] the room is full, “ said the authors of the report.
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At this point, the astonished doctors sent the boy for a CT scan that revealed the olfactory offender: a 9mm ball in his nasal cavity that was later identified as a metal column of BB gun.
When doctors revealed the culprit, the family remembered that the boy had indeed been shot in the nose with a shotgun a few years before he initially visited the doctor, when he was about eight or nine years old.
“The foreign body causes blockage of natural drainage pathways in the nose, so there is an accumulation of mucus, inhaled debris and bacteria,” says co-author Dylan Z. Erwin, a medical student at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.
The lack of symptoms in the first few years meant that the foreign body was not unnoticed and that the stuffy concoction was allowed to ‘mature’ into the tissue of the boy’s nose. “a healthy tissue has grown completely over it.”
The boy underwent surgery to remove the granule, his sense of smell was restored and, mercifully to his family and friends, the pungent odor he put out every time he blew his nose.
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