A 35-year-old woman had a chest CT scan to look into a dry cough and throat discomfort that had lasted three days. At the very top edge of the images, radiologists spotted something unexpected: a bright, well-defined object about 10 millimeters across, next to the right sublingual gland, one of the salivary glands in the floor of the mouth.
Its density suggested calcium, and one leading possibility was a salivary stone. A week later, the object was gone. It had been a cough lozenge in her mouth.
