Doctors made the number “180” from the beads the girl swallowed

“Some foreign bodies should be removed immediately”

Krasnodar doctors saved a girl who swallowed 180 magnetic beads. This would not have caused such surprise if the child had been two years old, but here the “young balloon swallower” turned out to be six years old. The girl complained to her mom and dad about abdominal pain, and her parents rushed to show her to the doctors at the regional children’s hospital.

It is not for nothing that surgeons call the most dangerous age for children to swallow foreign small things from 8 months to 3 years. Here the girl outgrew the dangerous period, but somehow the beads ended up in her stomach. Fortunately, for modern medicine such a case is not a problem. The balls were removed endoscopically. “In addition” to the balls, they also took out a berry seed from the child’s stomach. The entire operation took an hour and a half.

Doctors from Krasnodar turned out to have a sense of humor, so a video of the number “180” made of purple beads went viral on the Internet. Nearby there is a seed from a berry, similar to a cherry. From the video it follows that foreign bodies were removed from the child’s stomach by endoscopist Shalva Vardosanidze.

Professor, head of the department of endoscopic studies of the Federal State Institution National Medical Research Center for Children’s Health of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation Maxim Lokhmatov recalled that foreign bodies that children, and even adults, swallow through negligence, are different. There are extremely dangerous ones that need to be removed in the first hours after entering the gastrointestinal tract, and there are those that can be left and they will come out on their own. For example, batteries from watches or other devices (small, flat, about the size of a small button) are extremely dangerous items that should be removed within the first forty minutes or within the first hour.

A battery, for example, poses the most serious threat to the body, since it contains either acid or alkali. Once, doctors in the Bryansk region were unable to save a girl who lived with a swallowed battery for a week. As a result of a long stay inside the esophagus, it depressurized, which caused a severe deep burn of the mucous membrane. The alkaline environment damaged the wall of the esophagus and aorta, and doctors were no longer able to stop the bleeding.