A Queens grandma swallowed four of her false teeth — and they ended up biting through her esophagus, a new lawsuit says.
Eighty-three-year-old Chong Nan Woo was enjoying life, living independently in an apartment in Bellerose, when she accidentally ingested her bottom front incisors while taking her daily medications with a glass of water in September 2017, according to her suit and relatives.
The mother of six’s throat started hurting, so she went to the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, LI, her suit says.
“She told the doctors she swallowed the dentures. It was difficult to speak, but she told them. I expected it would be easy to find,” her son, David Lee, told The Post on Tuesday.
But it took doctors an astonishing 10 days to detect the missing chompers, even though they had cut through her esophagus and allowed fluid to leak into her spinal cavity, according to court documents and Lee.
“I don’t know why the doctors couldn’t find it. She kept complaining about the dentures being stuck in her esophagus,” Lee said.
After the teeth were discovered, doctors had to surgically remove them, the suit says.
But by then, Woo was suffering from a spinal infection that kept her in the hospital for more than three months, till January 2018.
Lee, 64, said that since the incident, his mother has become a shell of her former self, forced to go into assisted living and requiring around-the-clock care.
“She can’t eat or drink or even talk,’’ her son said. “She needs to be fed through a tube. It’s horrible. Every day. I’m getting heartbroken.”
To add insult to injury, Lee said, his mother’s dentures were never returned.
Woo’s lawyer, Christine Coscia, blamed the hospital staff for her client’s misfortune.
“It’s not the scan that missed the teeth, it’s the person analyzing the scan,” said Coscia, referring to the radiologist who allegedly failed to notice the teeth in her client’s CAT scan.
Woo is seeking unspecified damages.
Long Island Jewish Medical Center declined to comment on the allegations.