A patient learnt the hard way not to nap with a toothpick in his mouth when he developed a rare case of sacral plexopathy after inadvertently swallowing the stick.

The tip of the errant toothpick eventually penetrated the man’s rectum and pressed on the sacral nerves, report doctors from the Akita Cerebrospinal Centre in Japan.

The man, 67, had presented to the hospital with a two-month history of pain in the right buttock and posterior thigh.

There were no other sensory abnormalities, such as thermal hypoalgesia, paralysis or bladder-rectal dysfunction, doctors wrote in BMJ Case Reports.