A 9-year-old girl who snored in her sleep and had trouble swallowing turned out to have a lump of fully formed bone sitting at the base of her tongue, according to a case report published online Oct. 1, 2026, in the Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.
The mass had been growing slowly for about a year. A CT scan showed a sharply outlined lesion with the density of bone, measuring about 4.0 by 3.8 by 4.1 centimeters. That is roughly the size of a golf ball, lodged in a part of the body where bone has no business being.
