When I was five or so, I was eating a BLT and one of my brothers made me laugh. I managed to sort of inhale my mouthful of bread/lettuce/tomato/bacon and went into a coughing spasm that went on for what seemed forever. I did cough up all sorts of mangled bits of sandwich, and eventually I vomited, making an ungodly mess of the table. No one did anything about it, beyond thumping on my back and encouraging me to drink some water – which I couldn’t do, all the relevant structures were too busy trying to empty all the contents of my chest/belly out my mouth.
Anyway, nothing (noticeably) bad ever came from it, beside having a really bad sore throat for a while. But I got to wondering: all the choking/strangling sensation seemed to be up in my throat/neck. Does that mean nothing got further down? Or does your body just not have sensors that go into panic mode if a bit of whatever manages to slither further down into your lung’s passageways? I mean, I could perfectly well see a piece of a tomato slice sliming its way by gravity down into the inner depths.
If so, what would happen to it? Does it just sit there and rot or dry up or something? If they eventually autopsy me, would there be a bit of mummified tomato skin lurking down there somewhere?
Or are there some sort of scavenger thingies (white blood cells, maybe?) that seize onto such non-you stuff and try to digest it away?
I know one of my brothers (not the one who made me laugh) got stabbed with a pencil and some of the point broke off inside his arm. A long time later, like ten years, a bump formed nearby on his arm and then the chunk of graphite broke through the skin. Like it’d been wrapped up somehow and then the body had managed to shove it back out.
The body does its best to remove, breakdown, or at least wall off foreign material, and it often is able to do a good job. Not always. Hence tattoos!
Inhaled foreign material, if small enough, may be brought back up, stuck to mucous passed up and out by little hairs, cilia, on cells that line the airways. Very very small particulates can get absorbed into the body and cause all kinds of health issues.
Chunks? Are going to get stuck. The body will send all sorts of inflammatory agents including white blood cells to try to break it down and walk it off but the result is not a likely success. Pneumonia is one common reaction. Also the inflammation can damage the tubes of the small airways, widening in some places, pouches elsewhere. That damage gets call “brochiectasis” and will often result in chronic cough. Sometimes a lung lobe is removed to fix it.
FWIW peanuts are the worst nightmare. They cause a rapid and large inflammatory reaction, swell as they suck up water, and get soft. A bitch for the experts to remove on bronchoscopy.
So, “It depends” on a lot of factors seems to be the answer. Actually, that seems to be the answer to a whole bunch of questions about biological things.
Well, given that 60+ years have elapsed since this incidence without any noticeable problems, I guess either nothing made its way down, of it if did, it was both small enough and large enough not to cause major problems.
I read one story about a guy that stepped on a sewing needle and it broke off in his foot. Years later he scratched his tongue on something between two of his bottom teeth. It was the broken needle.
similar (albeit way less dramatic): not too gory, but potentially TMI so spoilered:
As a teenager I had a pimple on the inside (wing?) of my nose, that would stay there for var. days and hurt like a bitch.
After a bit of doctoring around and pressing/forcing it, a nose-hair (root-size first) popped out of the outside of my nose … seems that infection went all the way from the inside of my nose-wing to the outside (being the hair a possible culprit) - and the hair obv. migrated with the infection through the wall of my nose.
Tonsil Stones form when food gets stuck in the tonsils. The food and mucus surronding the food feeds bacteria, and eventually, the whole mass starts to calcify. If you are lucky, the tonsillolith will fall out of it’s crypt (technical term) and get swallowed. Otherwise you may cough it into your mouth - a cheese textured lump that smells disgusting. If you are really unlucky, you may bite the putrid thing.
Some people (when they become aware of the tonsil stone) use a long object to pry the stones out early, before it contributes to or causes halitosis. Personally, a low pressure water pik directed to the tonsil that is causing irritation usually does the trick.
On an even smaller scale, lysosomes scavenge and expel cellular waste. Diseases affecting them are usually passed on via recessive genes, and can be devastating. Here’s a simple explanation, with a list of some of the less uncommon ones. (Thankfully, they are rare.)
to the broken needle.