Doctors found 14 magnet balls stuck together in the boy’s intestines.
Specialist 2 Nguyen Minh Tien, Deputy Director of the City Children’s Hospital (HCMC), said that the patient with intestinal perforation is a 26-month-old boy, living in Dong Thap.
About a month before he was admitted to the hospital, he swallowed his 5-year-old sister’s jigsaw puzzles. The family took the baby to a local health facility for an abdominal X-ray, found the foreign body going down the small intestine, so the child was given an enema. Monitoring shows that the child has a normal bowel movement, so the family does not know if the marbles are out or not.
On January 27 (the 6th of the Lunar New Year), the child felt uncomfortable, had abdominal pain, and vomited, so his family took him to the City Children’s Hospital (HCMC).
Here, children vomit, cry, have abdominal pain. When taking an abdominal X-ray, the doctor found that the foreign body was still in the small intestine, so he performed an emergency gastrointestinal endoscopy and laparoscopy. The foreign body causes angulation of the jejunum into a ring of adhesions and perforation.
The surgeon decided to remove the flexed inflammatory bowel (regarding 7cm) and anastomosis. At the same time, take out 14 marbles of different colors, some rust causing serious intestinal damage. After one week of surgery, the child no longer had abdominal pain, no vomiting, was awake and had to monitor damage to the intestinal mucosa and gastrointestinal function.
Doctor Tien warned that toys for children under 5 years old must have a minimum diameter of more than 5cm, parents should not let children play with toys that are too small, which can be dangerous to life. When suspecting that a child has swallowed a foreign object, parents must take their child to the hospital immediately for timely treatment.
Linh Giao
