He has kept the E-ray as proof

A piercing enthusiast in the US discovered a nose ring he lost five years ago at an unusual place – his lung.

Till now, 35-year-old, Joey Lykins, assumed the ring had fallen out when he was sleeping. But he did not know that it was lodged in his lung all these years. He had given up and replaced the nasal ornament, according to news reports.

Mr Lykins has 12 other piercings but rediscovered his missing nose ring in a painful way.

“I thought maybe I’d swallowed it. I looked everywhere. I flipped the bed over. I did everything.

“One night, I was coughing so hard that my back was starting to hurt, I felt like something was blocking my airways, and I thought I was sick,” he said.

He was taken to a hospital where the doctors initially thought it was pneumonia. But the X-ray shocked them after the results showed a 0.6 inch nose ring embedded inside the upper left lobe of his lung and was lucky that the ring did not puncture his lung.

“The doctor came in and showed me the picture and said ‘does this look familiar?’ I was like ‘you’ve got to be kidding me? I’ve been looking for that’,” he told UK-based Metro.

Mr Lykins has kept the X-ray images and photographs from the surgery when the ring being extracted, as proof for those who cast doubt about the entire story.  -ndtv.com