Doctors have found some strange items in people’s airways: a leech (alive), tinfoil capsule, Chinese herbal medicine, a tooth, whistle, nasal ring and part of a tin can among them. So perhaps it’s no surprise that a makeshift guitar pick should join that peculiar list given guitarists unfortunate habit of holding them between their teeth.
Doctors at Nepal’s Manmohan Cardio-Thoracic Vascular and Transplant Centre recently saw a 28-year-young man who had been occasionally coughing up of blood over the past year, as well as suffering from a persistent dry cough and halitosis (despite brushing his teeth four times a day) for more than a decade.
But it was only when they delved more deeply into his medical history that he recalled that some 15 years ago, he had accidentally “ingested” a guitar pick at a “jamming session” with his friends. The pick, he recalled, was a makeshift one, made of a folded mobile recharge card cut into a smaller size.
“Apparently, he lost voice immediately and had a persistent feeling of ‘something stuck in the throat’ however, choking and respiratory distress were absent,” doctors Ranjan Sapkota, Aakriti Sharma, and Priska Bastola said, describing the incident in the Respirology Case Reports journal.
While a neck and chest X-ray failed to reveal the pick all those years ago, a new CT scan showed something lodged underneath the patient’s vocal cords, which was successfully removed via surgery.
“The foreign body was confirmed to be a folded mobile recharge card measuring 2.5 cm by 2.5 cm, with two sharp ends which acted like hooks anchoring the material to tracheal mucosa.”
The patient recovered fully and returned home after two days.
A similar case was reported in the July 2002 edition of Ear, Nose & Throat Journal when an unfortunate 17 year-old boy attended North Carolina’s Wake Forest University Medical Center after having problems swallowing. He had swallowed a pick the day before, which caught in his lower esophageal sphincter.
Rather than remove the pick, it was gently pushed into his stomach. If you look closely at the image below, you can even discern the brand of pick: Ernie Ball.
Back in 2015, Eddie Van Halen floated the theory that putting metal picks in his mouth may have contributed to his cancer.
“I used metal picks — they’re brass and copper — which I always held in my mouth, in the exact place where I got the tongue cancer,” he told Billboard in 2015.
“Plus, I basically live in a recording studio that’s filled with electromagnetic energy. So that’s one theory. I mean, I was smoking and doing a lot of drugs and a lot of everything. But at the same time, my lungs are totally clear. This is just my own theory, but the doctors say it’s possible.”
The lesson for guitarists is clear: keep picks in hands, not mouths.
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