This redefines “nasal cavity.”
A man who was struggling to breathe was flabbergasted after Mount Sinai surgeons discovered a half-inch-long tooth growing inside his right nostril.
The unnamed 38-year-old New York man had reported to the doctor after experiencing breathing difficulties for several years, according to a New England Journal of Medicine case study detailing the olfactory anomaly.
There, an examination revealed that the patient had a deviated septum — when the partition between the nasal passages is pushed to the side — as well as bone-like growths in the nose. These complications were vexing as the patient didn’t sport any visible facial trauma or abnormalities.
In order to get to the root of the problem, oral and maxillofacial surgeons Sagar Khanna and Michael Turner conducted a rhinoscopy — a nasal exam done via a tube-like instrument with a light and lens — whereupon they discovered a “hard, non-tender, white mass” poking up through “the floor of the right nostril.”
In layperson’s terms, this fellow had an incisor in the wine wafter.
Specifically, the man had a 15-millimeter ectopic tooth, which is defined as having a grub grinder in an abnormal place. The condition is exceedingly rare and normally entails teeth sprouting up in the jawbone under the gum rather than in the nose, a condition that affects from 0.1 to 1% of the population, per a 2019 study.
It remains unclear what causes these intranasal interlopers, although, in the past, doctors have blamed trauma and infections along with a cleft lip or cleft palate, a split in the roof of the mouth since birth.
Thankfully, doctors were able to remove the patient’s satellite incisor via invasive intra-nasal surgery sans any “postoperative complications,” per the report.
And, at a “follow-up three months after surgery, the patient’s symptoms of nasal obstruction had resolved,” per the study.
This isn’t the first time someone has had their nose colonized by an errant carrot cruncher. In 2019, a man who had lost his sense of smell was stunned after doctors told them that the culprit was a tooth growing inside his nostril.