He should be lucky it didn’t kill him.
A piercing addict woke up to find that his nose ring went missing in the middle of the night. Five years later, he was astonished to find that it had somehow been lodged in his lung the whole time!
Joey Lykins, 35, has over 12 piercings. The problem began when one of these piercings fell out.
Lykins said, “I woke up and my septum piercing was gone, and I couldn’t find it anywhere, “I’d had it pierced for three or four years [by that point].”
He continued saying, “I thought maybe I’d swallowed it. I looked everywhere. I flipped the bed over. I did everything.”
Lykin forgot about his missing nose ring until he woke up one night at 2:30 in the morning five years later with a severe coughing fit.
“I was coughing so hard that my back was starting to hurt,” he said. “I felt like something was blocking my airways, and I thought I was sick.”
It got so bad that Lykins went to the hospital to get checked out.
What he found out shocked him. X-rays revealed that Lykin’s nose ring was lodged in his left lung. Lykin’s said, “The doctor came in and showed me the X-ray picture and said, ‘Does this look familiar?’ I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me! I’ve been looking for that.’ “
Lykin’s continued by saying, “I didn’t know what was going on, but I never [would] have thought that’s what it was.”
“The doctor said I’d won ‘best case of the night,’ ” Joey Lykins, 35, told Kennedy News of his breath-taking ordeal. “I’ve never heard of this happening before.”
What is really surprising is that nothing more serious happened in the five years that Lykins’s nose ring has been in his lung. “I’ve coughed, but I never thought too much of it,” he added.
Lykin went on to say, “I don’t know if it could have caused damage, but it was wrapped up in scar tissue, so it didn’t look like it was going anywhere.”
Lykin was referred to a specialist for surgery. He had a bronchoscopy done, and the nose ring was safely removed.
“They put me to sleep, put a camera down my windpipe with a little grabber, grabbed it, pulled it out, and gave it back to me.” Lykin’s described.
Lykin learned his lesson and said, “I kept it as a souvenir, I won’t be wearing it again.”
