A former policeman told me about a case he dealt with in the late 1970s. A man had got up in the morning, had breakfast, got in his car and drove off to work. Halfway to work he had coughed a large amount of blood onto the windscreen of his car, collapsed over the wheel and died - crashing the car in the process.

He interviewed the man's spouse. They had a cocktail party at home the previous night and had been drinking heavily. At a certain point in the evening her husband had knocked back his drink so energetically that he had swallowed the cocktail pick along with the drink. The people talking to him saw what happened and everybody thought this was extremely funny, including her husband.

The pathologist confirmed that the cocktail pick had worked its way through the lining of his oesophagus and had eventually reached his heart.