In a bizarre medical case, a teenager who simultaneously experienced a loss of smell but gave off an unexplained “fetid odor” whenever he blew his nose over an eight-year period, finally found the culprit.
According to a recent report in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery, the boy first introduced himself to doctors when he was 15 years old with an impaired sense of smell.
Doctors performed an endoscopy on the teenager’s nose to determine the cause. They quickly realized that the boy had a condition known as “turbinate hypertrophy”, where the tubes in your nasal passage have increased, a condition often associated with allergies or inflammation of the sinuses.
The doctor prescribed nasal spray and a series of antihistamines to treat the seemingly mundane condition.
However, the teenager returned a year later, at 16, with no noticeable improvement in his nasal symptoms. In fact, he started expelling “a pungent and fetid odor [which] filled the room, “ said the report’s authors.
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It was at this point that the perplexed doctors sent the boy for a computed tomography scan that revealed the olfactory aggressor: a 9 mm sphere housed in his nasal cavity, which was later identified as a metallic bullet from a BB gun.
When doctors revealed the culprit, the family recalled that the boy had actually been shot in the nose with a lead shotgun several years before visiting the doctor initially, when he was about eight or nine years old.
“The foreign body blocks the natural drainage pathways in the nose, so there is an accumulation of mucus, inhaled residues and bacteria.” said co-author Dylan Z. Erwin, a medical student at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio.
The scarcity of symptoms in the early years meant that the foreign body was not detected and the putrid mixture was allowed to “mature” within the tissue of the boy’s nose, as “healthy-looking tissue has completely grown on it.”
The boy underwent surgery to remove the pill, his sense of smell was restored and, fortunately for his family and friends, the pungent odor he gave off every time he blew his nose stopped.
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