Porcupine Quill Ingested By Woman, Pokes Hole In Aorta

A woman unknowingly ingested a porcupine quill and had to be rushed to emergency room for chest pain, said a report on her case. The 49-year-old woman felt short of breath and the chest pain worsened as she lay down.

She had visited another emergency room just a week earlier for the same symptoms but the doctors there thought she was just having a panic attack and sent her back home. This report was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants in September.

However, when she visited the hospital for the second time, doctors found that the woman had fluid accumulation in the sac around the heart.  They also discovered a "poorly defined defect" on the wall of the aorta, the major blood vessel in the body. She was immediately admitted so that the excess fluid could be drained and further tests could be run to be sure about the case.

The woman had to undergo a procedure where the doctors drained the excess fluid from the sac but three days later, the procedure had to be repeated because more fluid had accumulated around her heart. Another six days later, they performed the procedure again, and this time along with blood in the fluid.

On conducting several more scans, the healthcare providers found that the defect in the aorta wall had now grown in size and was probably the cause of bleeding.

The doctors then decided to operate and had put the woman on "total circulatory arrest" during surgery, which meant that they completely stopped the blood from flowing in the body so that they could explore the exact problem with the aorta. On cutting into the woman's aorta, the healthcare providers discovered a black, sharp object that seemed to be a quill.

The quill was then removed carefully and the damaged section of the aorta was also cut off. The quill was sent to the pathology lab of the hospital, which stated that it was a porcupine quill, Live Science reported.

When the woman was told about the source of her injury, she informed the healthcare providers that her dog had tangled with a porcupine and she had to de-quill it many weeks before the symptoms appeared. The quill had poked a hole in her esophagus and then affected her aorta that caused the bleeding.