An unusual foreign body migrating through time and tissues

We present a case of a young girl who presented with an unusual foreign body which migrated through the cervical tissues causing repeated cervical tumescence's before being diagnosed.Repeated cervical abscesses or tumescence's in children or young patients should alert the treating physician to seek for an underlying pathology such as unnoticed foreign bodies or malformations (e.g. cysts). Further the scarce literature on these migrating foreign bodies is discussed.The most frequent ingested foreign bodies in the Ear Nose and Throat sphere are chicken and fish bones [1]. The symptoms are immediate and patients quickly seek for medical help after a few unsuccessful trials to extract the foreign body by themselves. Beside the tonsils, the base of the tongue and the upper esophagus are the places where usually the impacted foreign bodies are found [1]. Their removal is essential to prevent super-infections, abscesses and perforations with potentially life threatening mediastinal complications in case of esophageal foreign bodies [2]. Although rarely, foreign bodies sometimes migrate within the tissues and become symptomatic after a certain time lapse [3]. In those cases, the direct relation between the suspected foreign body ingestion and the first symptoms is rarely established due to the latency and unusual clinical presentation [4,5].We report the case of a 4-year old girl who was admitted to our ENT outpatient clinic with a cervical neck mass without other signs and symptoms. The patients history revealed, that she had previously been treated several times for odynophagia with cervical tumescence within the last two month. Symptoms and swelling disappeared temporally after the antibiotic treatments. However, the cervical mass rapidly reappeared after the end of the treatment. Otolaryngological examination showed no particularity, beside a firm lateral cervical mass. A cervical CT scan (Fig 1a) revealed a deep subcutaneous collection, suggesting the presence of an c