This could quite possibly be one of the strangest stories you’ll ever read.
An 11-year-old boy was rushed to hospital when two magnets he shoved up his nose were drawn together – despite being in different nostrils.
The anonymous child, from Cyprus, was unable to remove the magnets himself after they snapped together in the bone and cartilage that separates the two nostrils.
Quick-thinking doctors were able to assist him.
They guided the foreign objects out of his nostrils by teasing them out using their own magnets placed on each side of the nose.
An 11-year-old boy was rushed to hospital when the two magnets he shoved up his nose were drawn together – despite being put in different nostrils
Medics were so impressed by their ingenuity, and the bizarre case in general, that they submitted it to the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
Upon arrival at the emergency department at Near East University Hospital, Nicosia, the boy’s nose was bleeding and he was in pain.
Scans then revealed two disc-shaped foreign bodies situated at the same level across the nasal septum, the report stated.
Emergency treatment needed
Writing in the journal, the doctors warned that having any objects stuck in this area requires ’emergency removal’.
‘They can compress the mucosa of the nasal septum, leading to necrosis and septal perforation,’ they continued.
In this instance, the magnets had began to erode at cartilage in his nose.
Initial attempts to remove the magnets proved unsuccessful, and the boy was taken to the operating room under anesthesia.
Surgeons then used two additional household magnets to slide the ones stuck in the boy’s nasal septum out of his nostrils.
The boy’s nose had completely healed when he went to visit doctors for a follow-up appointment six months later.
Other strange cases…
The strange case comes month after MailOnline reported on the moment a spider calmly crawls out of a woman’s ear hours after it snuck in.
A woman, identified as Lekshmi L, had fallen asleep in the afternoon on her veranda but when she awoke she had a slight discomfort in her right ear.
She dug her finger into her ear canal to remove the obstruction but couldn’t. When rushed to hospital, doctors found it was caused by a spider.