AN English man said a piece of a rubber toy that was lost 40 years ago came out of his nose during a sneezing fit.

    Steve Easton, 51, had battled with blocked nasal passages and headaches all his life — but put his symptoms down to hay fever.

    It was only a few weeks ago that he realized the real cause — after sneezing out the tip of a toy dart.

    He said he was playing an Internet game at his home in Camberley when a sneezing fit prompted the emergence of the object from his nostril.

    Unsure of what he had found, Easton called his mother, 77-year-old Pat Easton, who told him what the object was — the end sucker piece on a toy rubber dart.

    Pat recalled finding her son playing with his dart gun and noticing one of the rubber tips was missing.

    “He said he’d swallowed it and there was just one of these darts without a tip. I took him to the hospital and they spent a lot of time looking for it, but in the end they said perhaps it was a mistake,” she said.

    “I knew it wasn’t and it always worried me — and now it’s suddenly shot out. We are all shocked.”

    Easton said, “I mentioned it to my doctor and he was amazed like everybody else. But he said there had been no harm done — it’s just one of those things.”

    In a somewhat similar episode in 2011, a man who was shot in the head during New Year’s Eve festivities in Naples, Italy, sneezed out a 22-caliber bullet as he waited to be seen by doctors.(SD-Agencies)