For six months, a 45-year-old man dealt with foul-smelling discharge from his right nostril and nosebleeds that came and went. When doctors looked inside with an endoscope, they saw a hard white mass sitting on the floor of his right nasal cavity, surrounded by calcified deposits.
A CT scan answered the question. The mass was shaped like a tooth, complete with a central pulp cavity, the hollow core that normally holds a tooth's nerves and blood vessels, and it extended from the hard palate up into the nasal cavity. The diagnosis was an intranasal ectopic tooth, a tooth that erupted into the nose instead of the mouth, together with a rhinolith, a stone-like mass that forms when mineral deposits build up in the nose.
