BB Gun Pellet Found In Teen's Nose 8 Years After He Got Shot

TEXAS — The phrase "you'll shoot your eye out" may be most associated with a BB gun, but as one teenager in Texas recently found out, the popular children's gift can take out a nose, too.

Doctors in Texas were puzzled when a 16-year-old boy was still experiencing nasal symptoms a year after he was prescribed a nasal spray and antihistamine medication, a Live Science report citing information in a JAMA Otolaryngology — Head & Neck Surgery journal.

Whenever the teen blew his nose, "a pungent, foul odor filled the room," authors reported.

"The patient reported that he did not feel he had bad breath, but he was embarrassed that every time he blew his nose there was a foul odor," it said.

A CT scan then revealed a 9 mm spherical structure in his nasal cavity, according to the report. Surgery was performed, and the object turned out to be a metallic BB pellet stuck in his nose.

Researchers then found out the boy had been shot in the nose with a pellet gun when he was 8 or 9 years old, some eight years before he felt any symptoms from the incident.

It's rare for someone who sustains a pellet gun injury to not have any nasal trauma symptoms, the report said. The pellet in this boy's case became harder to spot over time, according to Live Science, as it became covered with new tissue.

"Healthy-appearing tissue had completely grown over it," Dylan Z. Erwin, a co-author of the study and medical student at The University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, told the science-focused news outlet.

Surrounding tissue had to be removed surgically for doctors to even see the pellet.

"It had become lodged in the floor of the beneath a structure called the inferior turbinate. It was essentially so tightly wedged, that blowing the nose didn't remove it and it was too far back to be easily seen," Erwin said.

The foul odor was caused because "the foreign body causes blockage of natural drainage pathways in the nose, so there is a buildup of mucus, inhaled debris and bacteria," Erwin said.

The boy in this case was lucky, researchers said, because when a foreign body is stuck in the nose for a long period of time, doctors worry about the development of an infection that could spread to the jaw or the eyes.