She had never had a urinary tract infection. Then a 56-year-old woman arrived at a Melbourne emergency department with right flank pain and a fever. Her urine showed infection. Her CT showed a badly swollen right kidney and bulky uterine fibroids, and the fibroids took the blame.
They were not the cause. A wooden toothpick she had no memory of swallowing had worked its way out of her duodenum and bored a channel into her right kidney. It would take another six months of hospital care to find it.
