On the fifth day of his hospital stay, an 80-year-old man who had been living on liquids for weeks told his care team that swallowing suddenly felt easy again. A flexible scope passed through his nose confirmed it. The cyst that had been pushing his supraglottic structures toward the midline and narrowing his upper airway had collapsed, leaving no visible sac behind.
The case appears in the journal Cureus, reported by Assadiq E. Ahmed and Alaa Q. Abdalhafiz, otolaryngologists at Kalba Hospital in the United Arab Emirates. The cyst measured 2.1 by 2.5 by 1.5 centimeters and sat on the right side of the hypopharynx, the lower part of the throat where the airway and the food passage separate.
