Also filed under threats you never thought of: I can't find it at the moment, but there was a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine of an iron work

Also filed under threats you never thought of: I can't find it at the moment, but there was a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine of an iron worker who presented, as I recall, vomiting blood. Turns out some years ago, he had been working with a wire wheel and felt a sharp sensation in the back of his throat, but it subsided. Over the next decade or so, he had intermittent chest pain. A wire had flown out of the spinning wire brush, he had inhaled it midflight, it had landed in his trachea. Over the next decade, it slowly migrated through the trachea and penetrated one of the great vessels of the heart. Retrieving the wire and repairing both the trachea and the great vessel was a delicate matter.