A 9-year-old girl in Somalia inhaled her own tooth during a home extraction, and it took a referral chain across three hospitals before surgeons could pull it back out of her right main bronchus.
The case, published in February in Pediatric Health, Medicine and Therapeutics, was written up by pediatric surgeons in Mogadishu. The extraction had been done at the family's home using a traditional hand-based technique, with no instruments, no suction, and nothing protecting the airway. The child coughed suddenly, went into respiratory distress, and the family suspected the tooth had gone down the wrong way.
