Breast cyst aspiration is about as routine as outpatient procedures get. A needle goes in, fluid comes out, the patient goes home. So the complication described by a team at Hamad Medical Corporation in Doha is startling less for its severity than for how it happened.
During the procedure, a needle was accidentally dropped onto the patient's chest wall. A subsequent chest radiograph showed a 1.5-centimeter pneumothorax at the top of the right lung, meaning air had escaped into the space around it. The case, titled The Free Falling Needle, was published April 24 in Clinical Case Reports.
