A 56-year-old woman arrived at a Melbourne emergency department in July 2023 with right flank pain and a fever. She had never had a urinary tract infection in her life. Six months, several scans, multiple procedures, and one hysterectomy later, a gastroscope pulled a wooden toothpick out of her duodenum, and the infections stopped.
The case, written up by urologists at St Vincent's Hospital Fitzroy and Flinders University, was published in BJUI Compass in February. It is a single patient. What makes it worth reading is not the object but the sequence of reasonable-looking decisions that kept anyone from finding it.
