A 68-year-old man went in for back pain. He came out with a bronchoscopy, a resected airway tumor, and a diagnosis almost nobody expects to find inside a windpipe.
His chest radiograph, ordered for the back pain, showed a hyperdense lesion on the left first rib. That prompted a chest CT, which turned up something unrelated and far more interesting: a 4-by-2-millimeter sessile lesion sitting on the lateral wall of his trachea. Reviewing older imaging, clinicians found that the lesion had been present for at least a year without change.
