TEN YARDS OF CORD IN BOY’S LUNG

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 142, 12 March 1938, Page 8 (Supplement)

TEN YARDS OF CORD IN BOY’S LUNG

Amazing Operations

A s the result of two bronchoscope operations more than ten yards of white cord were removed from the right lung of 6-year-old Robert Sippel, of New York.

The child had been taken to the hospital presumably suffering from a laryngeal diptheria. Preliminary observation revealed something small and white, like a bit of infected membrane, in his throat.

He was put to bed and toys were given to him while physicians conferred. Suddenly he coughed and stopped breathing. His nurse summoned the chief surgeon. When the surgeon opened the windpipe of the child so that a tube could be inserted to permit him to breathe, a piece of white cord came into view.

The boy was placed on an X-ray-table. The doctors discovered a strange shadow in his lung. The child was wheeled into the operating room. A surgeon pushed a bronchoscope gently down into the lad’s chest, through a myriad of connecting tubes into the lung.

Through the hollow cylinder of the metal instrument the physician passed a narrow metal tube at the end of which was an electric light, no bigger than a grain of wheat, to locate the foreign body's exact position. He saw the white cord filling the lung, where it was tangled and snarled. like a fishing line in a bad cast. The surgeon inserted forceps into the narrow cylinder and began to haul out the string. Surgeons and internes, attracted by news of the unusual opera-

tion, tiptoed in and watched as yard after yard of string was brought up and snipped off as it came out of the top of the bronchoscope. The snarl was too thick and ravelled to pull up directly. The surgeon had to find a loose end here, and another there, then pull up as far as lie dared, so as not to lacerate the live tissue. For almost an hour the operation went on in silence, broken only* by- curt low commands to nurses, the hiss of the suction pump clearing the throat wound of blood, the clatter of instruments in metal basins, rhe occasional gasp of the child. The surgeon alternated in bringing some of the cord through the bronchoscope and some through the slit in the boy’s throat. After nine yards had been removed the operation was halted abruptly because <>l the patient s condition.

The removal was completed in the second operation, when the remaining forty-four inches of cord were extracted. During the intervening week nature had come to the surgeon’s aid byloosening the string, and Hie second operation took only about ten minutes. The surgeon fastened a guide string to the cord protruding from the boy’s throat and hauled out the remaining string in one piece through the bronchoscope. When the boy was able to talk, he explained that lie had been playing an “I-dare-you” game, and in n cord-swal-lowing act had choked ami coughed, propelling the mass of string into his lungs.