The opening was two millimeters across, about the width of a pencil lead. It sat on the left wall of a 65-year-old man's esophagus, just above where the tube meets the stomach. Through it, saliva and swallowed material had been leaking into his chest cavity for roughly a year, feeding infection after infection.
He had been hospitalized three separate times for pneumonia and empyema, a collection of pus in the space around the lung. A drainage tube in his left chest was still draining about 100 milliliters a day of pus mixed with clear, saliva-like mucus. The mucus was the giveaway.
