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KENOSHA, Wisconsin (WISN) — While having a tooth filled, a dental patient inhaled the drill bit so deep that he risked losing part of a lung.

Luckily, an inventive pulmonary surgeon came up with a way to pull out the inch-long piece of metal.

The drama began during what was to be a routine dental visit March 18 for Tom Jozsi, 60, of Antioch, Illinois. The dentist was in the middle of the procedure when, all of a sudden, the drill bit was missing — swallowed, he assumed.

“I didn’t really even feel it going down,” said Joszi, whose mouth had been numbed. “When they did the CT scan they realized, you didn’t swallow it. You inhaled it.”

The scan at a hospital’s emergency room revealed the bit was far down in his right lung. Jozsi was sent to another hospital for a bronchoscopy, where a thin tube was threaded down into the lung. But that procedure failed to retrieve the object.

The doctors called in Abdul Hamid Alraiyes, a pulmonary interventionalist at Aurora Medical Center in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who realized that normal scopes wouldn’t do the job.

“What happens if he can’t get it out? And the answer, really, was part of my lung was going to have to get removed,” Jozsi said.

In addition to possible tissue damage from the sharp metal, there was a risk of bacterial infection because it had been in his mouth.

Four days after he inhaled the bit, Jozsi went to Kenosha, where Alraiyes and his team deployed a device that’s not designed for removing foreign objects. The 3.5mm tube is generally used to reach deep into lungs to biopsy areas of possible cancer.

In the 90-minute procedure, Alraiyes was able to navigate the narrow airways and use the tube to grab the sharp end of the bit and pull it out.

“I was never so happy as when I opened my eyes, and I saw him with a smile under that mask shaking a little plastic container with the tool in it,” Jozsi said.

Jozsi said he now keeps the bit as a souvenir, displayed on a shelf at home.

He and his dentist think the mishap occurred because he inhaled and coughed almost at the same time. Alraiyes said  he has heard from colleagues in Michigan and Ohio who report seeing cases nearly identical to this.

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