Oesophageal foreign body: the importance of imaging in multiple coin ingestion

Description

A woman aged 61 years presented to a district general hospital with a 5-day history of dysphagia, regurgitation of all liquids and solids and lower sternal pain. She had a background of metastatic lung cancer with brain metastases and had previously received chemotherapy and radiotherapy. She was intermittently confused and had no recollection of ingesting a foreign body. On examination, her oral cavity, oropharynx and neck were unremarkable. Plain chest X-ray revealed a midline opaque foreign body at the level of the clavicular heads in the shape of a single coin (figure 1). A lateral soft tissue neck X-ray revealed, on close inspection, the presence of two foreign bodies and these appeared to be two coins lying on top of one another at the approximate level of T3 (figure 2). The patient was fasted and taken to theatre for a rigid oesophagoscopy. Intraoperatively, two...

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