An 89-year-old woman kept returning to the hospital with urinary infections that had spilled into her bloodstream. Antibiotics cleared each episode. Then another one arrived. The cause was not in her urinary tract at all. It was a chicken bone she had swallowed at some point, wedged in her sigmoid colon and pressing hard enough on the neighboring ureter to back urine up into her left kidney.
Radiologists described the case in the August issue of Radiology Case Reports, an open-access journal published by Elsevier. A computed tomography scan showed the bone sitting in the lower colon and compressing the left distal ureter from the outside, producing chronic obstructive uropathy and the swollen, urine-filled kidney and ureter that doctors call hydroureteronephrosis. An interventional radiology team placed a nephroureteric stent, which resolved the obstruction.
