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Health

Man's Lung Tumor Scare Was Actually Just a Toy He Inhaled 40 Years Ago

Doctors found a tiny traffic cone from a Playmobil set in Peter Baxter’s lung.
BBC Breakfast/The BMJ

Kids put things in their mouths—it's what they do. Usually a watchful adult will swoop in to save the day, and everything's back to normal. Doctors in the UK, though, have discovered what they think is a unique case: A child's toy that was inhaled and only found 40 years later, after being mistaken for a tumor.

Paul Baxter was 47 years old when he visited a respiratory clinic complaining of coughing up yellow mucus. He'd felt ill for more than a year. Two months earlier he'd been diagnosed with pneumonia, but his symptoms had cleared up after a course of antibiotics. He was a long-time smoker, so when a chest x-ray showed a mass on his lungs, doctors suspected the worst: a tumor.

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To be sure, doctors used a bronchoscope—a flexible viewing tube inserted into the patient's airway—to explore. The first probe proved too short to reach the mass, but doctors could see that it was orange. They later used a longer bronchoscope with attached forceps to remove the unidentified object.

But rather than a tumor, they'd extracted a tiny orange traffic cone, part of a Playmobil toy set Baxter said he'd received for his seventh birthday. "I only remember playing with them. I don't remember eating them. But obviously I've had it in my mouth, and like the doctor said, I've inhaled it," Baxter, now a postal worker, told the Manchester Evening News. "Because normally if you swallow it goes down the other pipe and passes through you."

The cone is about one centimeter long.

Baxter says the medical team had a good laugh at their unexpected discovery. But they also wrote up a case study in The BMJ because they believed it was the longest a foreign body had gone undiscovered in the throat and lungs. Children typically show choking signs after inhaling something, but if the object isn't found found, symptoms can appear similar to recurrent croup (an upper respiratory infection with cough) and asthma. It can lead to actual pneumonia and damage the lungs. In adults, aspirated objects can look like tumors, like in Baxter's case.

As to why it took Baxter almost 40 years to show symptoms of having a tiny traffic cone in his lungs, the study authors suggest it may be because he was so young. His airway may have adapted and remodeled around the obstruction; it may have been absorbed into the lining of the lungs around it. In similar long-term cases, though, the foreign object became solidly encased in tissue, requiring rigid bronchoscopy or surgery for removal.

Doctors speculate that only after years of smoking and a recent bout with pneumonia did the toy start to cause noticeable problems. With its removal, Baxter's symptoms have virtually vanished. He says he plans to keep the tiny traffic cone as a memento, and pass it on to his grandchildren. Naturally, he's going to watch closely that they don't inhale it.

Baxter's coworkers had a bit of fun during his interview with BBC Breakfast:

BBC Breakfast

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