This is not a drill.

An Illinois man gave new meaning to the term “iron lung” after he accidentally sucked a nearly inchlong dental drill tip down through his airways, and it stayed lodged there for almost a week.

“I didn’t really even feel it going down. All I felt was a cough,” Tom Jozsi, 60, told KFVS of the incident, which occurred while the maintenance worker was getting a cavity filled. He reportedly inhaled the component after it broke off the tooth-hollowing instrument during the procedure.

Jozsi was subsequently transferred to the Aurora Medical Center in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where CT-scans revealed that the tool tip had traveled past the larynx and trachea, and eventually embedded itself near the base of his right lung.

“It was really far down on the right lower lobe of the lung,” said pulmonary expert Abdul Alraiyes, who presided over the removal.

The doctor suspected that the patient had inhaled just before swallowing, which is why the drill managed to bore so deep, KFVS reported.

Unfortunately, due to the drill head’s tricky location, medical experts feared they’d have to excise a piece of Jozsi’s lung to prevent the interloper from damaging the surrounding tissue.

“What happens if he can’t get it out?” he fretted. “And really, the answer was part of my lung was going to have to get removed.”

Fortunately, Alraiyes and the team were able to circumvent that outcome by thinking outside the surgical tool box. They decided to extract the drill bit with a robotic ion catheter, which was designed for detecting cancer early rather than removing foreign bodies.

Accompanying footage of the novel procedure, dubbed a robot bronchoscopy, shows the instrument navigating Jozsi’s labyrinthine airways like a miniature spelunker. The cybernetic surgeon was able to locate and retrieve the drill tip sans harming the patient, per the clip’s caption.

“I was never so happy in my life,” gushed Jozsi, who carried the drill tip in his lung for four days.

The Wisconsinite reportedly keeps the bit on a shelf at home as a reminder of the harrowing ordeal.

This isn’t the first time someone has had a drill in their gills. Alraiyes revealed that he’d been in touch with doctors in Ohio and Michigan who claim they’d also seen patients who’d swallowed the tool bit.