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| Photo: Duke Medicine News. |
The Wilmington, N.C., man was constantly under the weather, prone to pneumonia and shortness of breath, and doctors didn't know why. His wife, thinking he was depressed, even bought two dogs to try and cheer him up and get him out of the house.
But last week, doctors at Duke University Medical Center finally unraveled the mystery of Manley's chronic health woes: a piece of a Wendy's plastic utensil had been lodged in his lung.
It took two years of treatment, including one 11-day hospital stay, and Manley insisting something was in his lung before his doctors looked at him with a camera. "That's whey they found the item," Manley told Slashfood. "They didn't know what it was. All they knew was that it had some kind of writing on it."
"We figured out ... it was saying hamburger," Dr. Momen Wahidi, director of interventional pulmonology, told the Charlotte Observer. "But why would something that says hamburger be in this patient's body?"
Manley said he had no idea how or when the plastic got into his lung, but thinks he may have ingested in with a drink as he's "a gulper."
The discovery also took Wendy's by surprise.
"This is the first we've heard of it, and we're baffled just like everyone else as to how something like that could happen." said Wendy's spokesman Denny Lynch. "I've been with the company for 29 years and I've never heard of anything like this happening. This is a first for me, that somebody somehow inhaled a piece of a spoon and that the poor man walked around with it for ... two years? That's a shame that he's been in discomfort for so long."
Manley still needs follow-up care, he said, to make sure that there are no lingering pieces of the plastic utensil in his lung and to clean up the scar tissue that remains. But he's feeling much better now.
"I can breathe. I couldn't breathe before. I was constantly sick. I was pretty much house ridden for two years. That was not fun. I'm a very active person, and I was not happy sitting in the house," he said.
As for his relationship with his one-time go-to fast food joint, Wendy's, Manley said he's not in any rush to return.
"I'm not a fast-food junkie, but when I do go, I do go to Wendy's," he said. "I don't think I'll be running out to any fast-food joints any time soon."
[Via Charlotte Observer]
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