47-Year-Old Man discovers 'Tumor' was actually Toy he swallowed as Child

A plastic Playmobil toy traffic cone was found by doctors in the lung of a 47-year-old man that was originally believed to be a tumor. The patient, from Preston, England, was a long-time smoker who presented with a persistent, year-long cough and yellow mucus — leading his doctors to believe the spot on his lung found on an X-ray was cancer.

He underwent a bronchoscopy — a procedure that involves a scope threaded down the throat for viewing and diagnosing purposes — and his doctors discovered the "long-lost Playmobil traffic cone" that the patient received and lost on his seventh birthday, according to The Guardian.

"Following the procedure, the patient reported that he regularly played with and even swallowed pieces of Playmobil during his childhood," the doctors wrote in BMJ Case Reports, a medical journal. "He recalled being given this Playmobil set for his seventh birthday and believes he aspirated the toy traffic cone soon after."

It was the first case, the doctors said, in which a foreign object lodged in a patient's body was undetected for 40 years. They assume that since it was inhaled into the lining of the patient's lung while he was a child, the lung continued to develop around it as he grew. Four months after its removal, his symptoms subsided and his cough had practically vanished.

The doctors said in their report that perhaps "aspiration occurred at such a young age, that the patient's airway was able to remodel and adapt to the presence of this foreign body," but that "a case in which the onset of symptoms occurs so long after initial aspiration is unheard of."