Doctors Save Elderly Dementia Patient Choking on Giant Hair Tie

Doctors at Ziv Medical Center in Safed successfully removed a 15-centimeter hair tie from the esophagus of an 80-year-old woman suffering from advanced dementia, narrowly saving her life. The woman, a resident of a village in the Galilee, was hospitalized in the geriatric ward when she began to choke and experienced severe respiratory distress, with her oxygen levels dropping significantly.

Specialists Dr. Marwan Karam and Dr. Alaa Safia from the Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) department were immediately called to the scene. Using an endoscope inserted through the nasal passage, they discovered a large, purple foreign object lodged in the entrance to her esophagus. The hair tie was blocking over 80% of her airway and pressing on her epiglottis, the flap that covers the windpipe.

In a swift procedure, one doctor guided the endoscope while the other used forceps inserted into the patient's mouth to extract the hair tie. The patient was then returned to the geriatric ward in stable condition, breathing normally.

"The hair tie blocked the airway by more than 80 percent, and if we hadn't arrived in time, the patient would have died," the doctors stated, emphasizing the danger posed by her dementia, which prevented her from alerting staff or family. Professor Salman Zarka, Director of Ziv Medical Center, praised the medical teams for their quick and professional response, highlighting this incident as another example of rare choking events treated at the hospital, including a previous case where a large piece of watermelon caused a similar emergency for a 42-year-old man.