Man swallows AirPod, gets it removed

Imagine feeling some pain down your chest, only to find out that the pain comes from an unusual source. That was the case for Bradford Gauthier, from Worcester, Massachusetts, who wrote his out-of-the-ordinary story on a Facebook post after swallowing an AirPod.

Gauthier wrote that he tried to drink a glass of water in the morning following a night of snow shovelling, only to notice that his sips wouldn’t go down naturally, to which he thought was dryness related after his time spent in the snow. He also admitted that he felt something was off and that he had some pressure down his chest.

He joked along with his close friends and family thinking that he may have accidentally swallowed one of his Apple AirPods in his sleep.

“By that point, my son and wife had gotten the idea that I may have swallowed it. They brought it up jokingly at first, but it seemed too coincidental that I would be missing it when I knew I went to bed with it, while I felt a distinct blockage in the centre of my chest,”  Gauthier said to American TV station KVEO.

An unexpected turn of events at the ER revealed the source behind his discomfort.

“Fast forward to a trip to the ER and an X-Ray, and sure enough I had an AirPod lodged in the lower part of my esophagus. I just had an emergency Endoscopy to get it removed,” wrote Gauthier.

“Be careful listening to wireless headphones when you fall asleep, you never know where they’ll end up!” concluded Gauthier on his social media post.

Image Credit: Daniel Romero on Unsplash