Toddler in Sharjah swallows a 50 fil coin

Dubai: Surgeons at Al Zahra Hospital, Sharjah, conducted an emergency gastroscopy surgery to extricate a coin, accidentally swallowed by a three –year old girl.

The toddler, Ayat Isra Imtiyaz, weighing 10.8 kg, a resident of Sharjah, was playing with a 50 fil coin when she placed it in her mouth and before her mother, who ran to her, could take it away, she swallowed it.

Recounting the incident, the mother, Shabnaz Aziz, told Gulf News: ”I was speaking to my sister on a video chat. Ayat was in the room itself and I was watching her as I continued the conversation. Suddenly, I saw a coin gleaming in her hand and I quickly hung up and ran across to her. But by then, she had managed to put it into her mouth and she was choking. I tried to extract the coin but when nothing worked, I rushed her to the Emergency Room at Al Zahra.”

Aziz called her husband, Imitiaz, who was on his way home from work. When they took the child to the ER, doctors immediately scanned the digestive track of the child and located the coin near the lower intestine.

Specialist paediatric surgeon Dr Wissam Al Tamr advised extraction of the foreign body and Dr Prithvi Priyadarshini, specialist gastroenterologist, conducted the procedure under deep sedation.

“Kids often ingest small foreign bodies like coins and this is dangerous as it can cause infection and choking. Luckily in this case, the coin had gone right in and the child was comfortable. Using mild sedation, we were able to extract the coin ,” added Dr Priyadarshini.

What you need to do if a child swallows a foreign object

• Make sure the child is not choking on it. Symptoms of choking include going blue in the face, having trouble breathing, swallowing or speaking.

• Know what your child swallowed , batteries and some coins can be corrosive and cause damage to the mucosal lining of the digestive tract and must be extracted.

• Do not try to extract the foreign body by yourself, but take the child to the ER, just in case it may be stuck in the wrong place.

• Observe the symptoms while on way to ER. If the coin lodges in the oesophagus (food pipe), your child will exhibit signs of increased salivation, difficulty swallowing, vomiting, neck pain, chest pain or coughing.

• A foreign body lodged in the intestine can result in perforation of the intestine wall and cause severe infection which can also be fatal, so let the doctors decide on immediate plan for extraction.

• Usually a coin passes through the poop in four to five days. But it is best to seek immediate extraction under sedation in a minimally invasive way like through endoscopy for immediate relief.