Man Spends 6 Days in the Hospital After Toothbrushing Session Goes Terribly Wrong

Here’s another thing to add to the list of highly unlikely but deeply horrifying injuries you could sustain in the safety of your own home. A recent case report detailed a 50-year-old man who fainted while brushing his teeth and ended up hospitalized as a result.

Doctors at The University of Tokyo Hospital described the unusual incident earlier this month in BMJ Case Reports. After fainting, the man’s toothbrush scraped the back of his throat severely enough to trap air inside, raising the risk of a potentially serious infection. He was hospitalized for nearly a week and avoided any disastrous complications.

According to the report, the man first visited the hospital with a mild sore throat. Sometime earlier, he experienced “syncope” (the medical term for fainting) while brushing his teeth. Upon initial physical examination, the doctors spotted a three-millimeter-long abrasion along his soft palate without bleeding. But a CT scan soon revealed a more dangerous injury: retropharyngeal emphysema.

This condition is characterized by free air or gas entering the area behind the throat. It’s most often caused by bronchial asthma, though physical exertion or even non-violent coughing can spontaneously cause it as well. The condition can be dangerous because it might allow certain bacteria to grow in areas of the chest where they typically couldn’t, leading to life-threatening infections like mediastinitis. It may also trigger the formation of blood clots in the carotid artery, which could then cause a stroke.

The man was hospitalized and given a prophylactical course of antibiotics to prevent these bacteria from taking hold. He recovered and was discharged six days later with no complications or CT abnormalities.

Unsurprisingly, toothbrush-related injuries are much less common among adults than they are in children. But there are rare reports of adults injuring their throats with wayward toothbrushes under unusual circumstances. So doctors should at least be aware of these injuries, the report authors wrote, and they should order medical imaging to properly assess the extent of the damage caused by them. People who develop toothbrush-related retropharyngeal emphysema should also be given preventative antibiotics and hospitalized for observation for at least two to three days, they added.

All things considered, the man’s fainting episode could have ended up way worse.

In 2023, for instance, a different team of doctors in Japan wrote about a man who fell while brushing and got his toothbrush literally lodged through the back of his throat. The object luckily avoided puncturing any vital body parts or arteries and was successfully removed surgically. And yes, just in case anyone’s wondering, people have also gotten hurt from sticking a toothbrush up their butt (please be advised that the preceding link to the report contains very graphic images of said injury).