Illnesses blamed on bit of plastic in lung

John Manley's suffering was a mystery.

For more than a year, the 50-year-old Wilmington home remodeler was wracked with coughing spells. He had no energy. He battled frequent bouts of pneumonia.

His wife bought him two dogs because she hoped the animals might cheer him up and compel him to get out of the house.

“I thought he was depressed,” Karen Manley says. “He was in bed all the time.”

Finally, last week, Manley got a diagnosis.

Deep in his left lung was lodged a jagged, inch-long piece of a plastic eating utensil from a Wendy's restaurant. Manley speculates he sucked in the piece with a drink.

“I'm a gulper,” he says. “I gulp stuff. I always have.”

He has no recollection of inhaling the plastic. But soon after eating at Wendy's about 18 months ago, his health took a downward spiral. Wilmington doctors figured he was suffering complications from an earlier heart attack or was battling a bad bug. He took round after round of antibiotics.

“I was coughing up a lung,” he says. “That's an exact statement.”

Finally, after gagging on blood and spending a week in the hospital, Manley asked doctors to run a scope into his lungs. Sure enough, something was there, in the left lung stem. It even had some writing on it. The doctor could see an “S.”

After several failed attempts to extract the item, Manley was referred to another doctor, who suggested removing the entire left lung.

“I said, no, I wouldn't be doing that,” Manley says.

That's when he decided to seek a second opinion at Duke University Medical Center.

Dr. Momen Wahidi, director of interventional pulmonology, said Manley's case presented challenges because so much scar tissue had formed.

But he was soon able to uncover more of the mystery item. He called out letters — an A, a B, a U, an R.

“We figured out… it was saying hamburger,” Wahidi says. “But why would something that says hamburger be in this patient's body?”

That's a question Manley is still pondering. Last week, after awaking from surgery for the removal of the object and immediately feeling better, Manley says this much he knows: He will now and forever drink through a straw.