A sixteen-year-old boy noted that every time he blew his nose, a ‘sharp, bad smell filled the room’. He has been dealing with nose problems for years, including congestion and problems smelling things. But doctors turned it into a kind of sinus infection, perhaps due to allergies, and sent him home with ‘nasal spray and antihistamine medication’, according to WordsSideKick.com.
But when the symptoms persist and when the mysterious and embarrassing becomes a symptom, he gets a CT scan, in which a small ball appears in his nasal cavity. It turns out to be a metal BB pellet that hit him in the nose when he was 8 or 9 years old.
From LiveScience:
Foreign objects that get stuck in the nose can sometimes cause a bad odor because ‘the foreign body causes blockage of natural drainage pathways in the nose, so that there is an accumulation of mucus, inhaled debris and bacteria’, co-author Dylan Z. studies. Erwin, a medical student at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, told Live Science. But this buildup does not always cause fever or other signs of a whole body infection, and the diagnosis can therefore be missed, Erwin said.
In addition, in the case of the boy, the grain was even more difficult to detect because it was covered with new tissue over time. “Healthy tissue has grown completely over it,” Erwin said. For doctors to even see the grain, this tissue had to be surgically removed, he said. …
Grain gun injuries are common in adolescents, but the current case was unique because the injury occurred so long ago, and the boy did not have symptoms of nose trauma, the report said.
The boy was successfully operated on to remove the grain, and ‘the unpleasant odor disappeared’.
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