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Man coughs up nail after MRI helps dislodge it

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Prax Sanchez says he doesn’t recall any serious hammer-and-nail mishaps in his past.

Yet doctors administering an MRI on the 72-year-old Colorado man last month abruptly stopped the exam to tell him there seemed to be something metallic in his face.

Right after the MRI, Sanchez coughed up an inch-long nail.

His doctor, Jamieson Kennedy, told television station KKTV in Colorado Springs that the nail might have been embedded there as long as 30 years. The MRI’s magnetic force apparently dislodged the nail, causing Sanchez to cough it up.

Sanchez says he can’t remember ever using a nail like it.

“I’ll probably frame it,” he said Friday.

Citizen Online Archive, 2006-2009

This archive contains all the stories that appeared on the Tucson Citizen's website from mid-2006 to June 1, 2009.

In 2010, a power surge fried a server that contained all of videos linked to dozens of stories in this archive. Also, a server that contained all of the databases for dozens of stories was accidentally erased, so all of those links are broken as well. However, all of the text and photos that accompanied some stories have been preserved.

For all of the stories that were archived by the Tucson Citizen newspaper's library in a digital archive between 1993 and 2009, go to Morgue Part 2

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