Shocking reason for man’s unbearable blocked nose

For three months a man struggled with unbearable sinus issues. Desperate, he went to the hospital where doctors made an unexpected discovery.

Having a blocked nose is never pleasant.

The struggle to breathe, the gross extra bodily fluids, the sore red nose … yep, it’s definitely not fun.

Thankfully, those symptoms generally tend to disappear within five to 10 days — the average length of the common cold or flu.

But for Zhang Binsheng a 30-year-old from the city of Harbin in northeastern China, his struggle lasted much longer.

After three months, his symptoms became so severe he had trouble breathing and could not sleep properly at night. He even experienced a bizarre smell of decay.

Doctors found a suspicious shadow in the man’s nasal passage. Picture: Supplied / Pear Video

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Seemingly desperate, he went to visit doctors at Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University who gave him an X-ray and made a horrifyingly gross discovery.

After spotting a shadow “with high density” at the back of his nasal cavity, Mr Binsheng’s doctor uncovered the cause of his blocked nose — a tooth that was somewhere it shouldn’t have been.

“(It) looked a lot like a tooth,” Dr Bai Zhibang, a deputy director at the hospital’s ear, nose and throat department, told Pear Video.

When his patient heard about what was hiding in his nose, he remembered he’d “lost” a tooth 20 years ago.

When he was just 10, the man lost two teeth in a nasty fall — one of which had been lodged in his nose for 20 years. Picture: Supplied / Pear TV

Then a 10-year-old boy, Mr Binsheng recalled tripping while at a shopping mall in 1999 and losing two teeth, one of which was recovered but the second was never found.

Despite being badly injured in the fall, receiving 60 stitches to his face — he said he didn’t experience any pain or discomfort in his nose, so no one thought too much about the missing tooth.

However the force of the impact had actually pushed his tooth up into his sinuses leaving him unaware that all this time it was hiding in his nasal passage — and, according to his doctors, had managed to root and grow in his nose.

The tooth has now been removed. Picture: Supplied / Pear TV

His doctor told the publication that because the tooth belonged to the man, his body had not rejected the “foreign object” — which had caused it to go undetected for two decades.

The out-of-place tooth, which was 1cm long, has now been removed in a 30-minute procedure.

WEIRD FINDS IN NOSES

Mr Binsheng is not the only man to have made an unnerving discovery in their nose recently, with a Sydney patient making a horror find of his own in his nasal passage.

The 48-year-old man was plagued by constant headaches and sinus problems for years, eventually seeking help at Westmead Hospital where he underwent a CAT scan that showed he had a 1.9cm by 1.1cm lesion in his right nostril.

Inside the lesion was a “firm grey mass” that when removed while he was under general anaesthetic revealed itself to be a “‘rubber capsule containing degenerate vegetable/plant matter” that turned out to be cannabis, the British Medical Journal reported.

The scan revealed something was lodged in his nasal cavity. Picture: British Medical Journal

The man then remembered that while he was in jail 18 years ago, a girlfriend had smuggled him a balloon full of the drug and he had shoved the package up his nose to avoid detection.

Despite smuggling the cannabis past guards, the man had a problem when it came to retrieving the package — he couldn’t find it.

Believed he had somehow swallowed it, he said he forgot about it — but, in fact, he had pushed the drugs further up into his nasal cavity where they remained stuck.

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Originally published as Shocking reason for man’s unbearable blocked nose