A man who woke up to find his nose ring had vanished discovered it was lodged in his lung five years later.
Joey Lykins was rushed to hospital at 2.30am through fear he had pneumonia after coughing so violently he ended up with back ache.
Doctors carried out an x-ray and were stunned to spot the piece of jewellery that the 35-year-old thought had fallen out of his nose while he was sleeping in the upper lobe of his left lung.
Joey, who has 12 piercings, had woken up five years earlier and noticed the septum piercing was missing so turned his bedroom upside down looking for it but eventually just replaced it with another.
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The groundskeeper admits it's hard to believe unless you have proof - so he made sure he kept copies of his startling x-ray and even images from the surgery that show the ring being extracted from inside him.
Joey, from Cincinatti, Ohio, US, said: "About five years ago I woke up and my septum piercing was going and I couldn't find it anywhere. I'd had it pierced for three or four years [by that point].
"I thought maybe I'd swallowed it. I looked everywhere, I flipped the bed over, I did everything. I have a thing for piercings and tattoos so I just replaced it.
"I woke up [last week] and I was coughing really hard. I felt like something was blocking my airways and I thought I was sick.
"About 2.30am I was coughing so hard that my back was starting to hurt and I was a little concerned so I went to the hospital. I thought maybe I had pneumonia.
"It felt like there was something there when I was coughing but I just thought I was sick.
"I had an x-ray and the doctor came in and showed me the x-ray picture and said 'does this look familiar?' I was like 'you've got to be kidding me? I've been looking for that'.
"It just went down my windpipe I guess. My wife was dumbfounded when I told her. It's one of those things that's hard to believe unless you have proof.
"The doctor said I'd won best case of the night."
Joey went to see a specialist three days later who put him to sleep while they performed a bronchoscopy where a thin tube was passed down his throat and into his lungs and the piercing was pulled out and returned to him.
He said the piercing hadn't caused him problems until now and when he woke up coughing, he never would have suspected the nose ring would be to blame.
Joey said: "They put me to sleep, put a camera down my windpipe with a little grabber, grabbed it, pulled it out and gave it back to me.
"I kept it as a souvenir, I won't be wearing it again.
"I don't know if it could have caused damage but it was wrapped up in scar tissue so it didn't look like it was going anywhere. I'm glad it didn't puncture my lung.
"It had never caused me problems, I've coughed but I never thought too much of it.
"I didn't know what was going on but I never have thought that's what it was. I've never heard of it happening before."
