Woman undergoes urgent operation after swallowing 'deadly mango' seed

A 57-year-old woman from Surrey, England, underwent urgent surgery after a mango seed got stuck in her throat while eating a mango pickle.

As per a report by The Telegraph, the woman was rushed to the emergency department of the local Epsom Hospital when something pierced her throat. She told the medical staff she was unable to swallow something stuck in her food pipe.

Doctors conducted an examination and sent the woman back home telling her that they could not see anything wrong with her. 

The examiners found that the woman was still drooling easily and was able to swallow food as well, the Telegraph reported. There was no "foreign body" in the woman's body.

Doctors told the woman that she might have been feeling the reported sensation due to gastritis (irritation of the stomach lining) or a scratch caused by some sharp food particle. They told her to return only if she felt more unwell.

Four days later, the woman returned to the hospital with signs of sepsis which is the body's extreme and life-threatening reaction to infection. She was unable to swallow anything at that point and had a sore throat. When the doctor conducted a CT Scan, they found an oesophageal tear. The woman also had air in her chest.

The diagnosis of sepsis was followed by an urgent surgery in Guilford where a mango seed was found stuck in her throat. The seed was operated out of the body and the woman stayed on intravenous antibiotics for a week, the outlet reported.

Later, the woman, who fully recovered from the condition, filed a complaint against the hospital trust.

According to The Telegraph report, the hospital told the investigators that such throat problems usually come from "fish or broken bones such as in chicken”, which is why they did not consider the mango seed a threat.

The investigation team was also told that the country had no national guidelines for such a scenario. 

“From something ridiculously obscure and exotic, and unlikely ever to happen again, the trust has created pragmatic and useful learning points," the outlet quoted Dr Richard Jennings, the chief medical officer of the Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust as saying.

“I was also very happy, having felt anxious reading the title, to find it was a ‘potentially deadly mango’,” Jennings added.