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I have been through surgery four times, and every time they ask if I can remove my wedding ring, and every time, they give up and cover it up with tape or silly putty or something like that.

I don't have dentures, but I would want to remove them if I had a fifth surgery.
It only makes sense.

Here's why:  a 72-year-old British man had his partial dentures get stuck in his throat during surgery.  AND no one figured it out for eight days, not even the edentulous victim of this negligence.

After eight days of having trouble swallowing, and coughing up blood, the man figured maybe he should go to the emergency room and let someone have a look-see down there.

Eight days.

ER Docs ordered up a chest X-ray, called it pneumonia, and sent him on his merry way with antibiotics and steroids.

Then he went to another (better) hospital for another X-ray. That showed his dentures — a metal roof plate and three false teeth — stuck at the top of this throat.

You really have to look very, very closely to see what's wrong in this throat.

This was good news to the man, because he thought the hospital where he had the surgery in the first place had lost his false choppers.

Dr. Mary Dale Peterson, an anesthesiologist at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, Texas, says putting a tube in a patient’s airway can have the result of putting things where they don’t belong.

And she went to medical school to learn that!

Back in Britain, the poor man still had a couple of rounds of bleeding and needed more surgery before he was all better. No one is naming the man, the hospitals, or the doctors (Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard) so that they can all try to get better without having people laugh at them on the streets.

Doctors recommend telling your surgeon what's going in your mouth, if anything.