A 43-year-old man arrived at the hospital in acute respiratory distress, with a fever, a racing heart, and a four-day cough that brought up foul-smelling sputum. A CT scan showed a lung abscess so large that it had essentially replaced the upper segment of the lower lobe of his left lung.
His surgeons traced the problem to his stomach, and to a weight-loss device that had been placed around it 15 years earlier.
