A man from Massachusetts has warned AirPod users not to wear them when they sleep after he swallowed one overnight — and has no idea how it happened.
Brad Gauthier, 38, woke up struggling to breathe last Tuesday and choked on a glass of water.
The real estate title examiner from the city of Worcester carried on despite a strange sensation in his chest.
He even shovelled snow from his driveway after a blizzard.
When he went back inside he noticed one of his $129 wireless Apple headphones was missing.
His wife Heather joked that he had swallowed it.
“We laughed about it, but something just clicked and I got a weird sinking feeling that I’d swallowed it in my sleep,” he told Mail Online.
“At that point, I putzed around for another 10 minutes thinking about it but we all determined it’d be better safer than sorry to go to hospital.”
Hospital staff first suggested the problem was heartburn from food at his wife’s birthday party the night before.
But after X-rays, doctors were shocked to find one of the pods inside him.
The device measured around two inches long and had lodged in his throat for nearly 24-hours.
‘They were all jaws aslack, looking at this x-ray, on the screen where you could see it in such clear definition,’ Gauthier said.
Medics performed an emergency endoscopy, using a long, thin tube to remove the AirPod from his oesophagus.
Gauthier walked away with no lasting injuries, though the AirPod’s microphone was now broken.
He thinks the earbud must have fallen from his ear into his mouth during the night.
Nurses told him he was fortunate not to have suffered serious harm.
“Had I inhaled it or it had gotten lodged or constricted my airway that could have certainly been a significantly more serious matter,” Gauthier said.
“You don’t have a lot of runway if you obstruct your breathing and something happens, who would even think that’s what it was if you wake up to something like that. I’m really lucky things happened the way they did.”
He posted photos of the X-ray on Facebook and called the incident “one for the record books”.
He warned AirPod users: “Be careful listening to wireless headphones when you fall asleep, you never know where they’ll end up!”
The mishap sounds unusual but is not unique.
In January last year, a 7-year-old boy in Georgia swallowed an AirPod and had to wait for it to pass through his system.
And in 2019 a man in Taiwan experienced a similar incident, with his AirPod later reappearing and miraculously still working.