A Pill Turned into a Foreign Body in a Patient in a Hurry

Figure 1A 55-year-old woman was referred to our endoscopy unit with a 1-month history of continuous retrosternal pain, dysphagia, and odynophagia located in the upper half of the esophagus. She had been suf- fering from these symptoms after swallowing three pills at once because of a troublesome headache. As she was in a hurry, she did not notice that one of them was still in its plastic cover. On barium meal examination, the pill was seen as a sharply radiolucent, round, filling defect (indicated by black arrowhead) in the upper thoracic esophagus. It was removed by endoscopy.

Figure 2The size of the plastic-covered pill, 2 cm in diameter.