Hospital in battery bungle

A Melbourne mum has told how her intuition may have saved her little girl from brain damage.

Four-year-old Shaylee Wilson loves playtime, but a game of hide and seek with a battery could have killed her when she decided to stick it up her nose.

Shaylee's mum Brooke told 7News: "We'd put her to bed and she'd said nothing, and later on about 40 minutes after we'd put her down she started complaining about it."

It didn't take long to realise something was very wrong with her little girl.

"We woke up and she had gunk coming out of her nose," Brooke explained.
"It smelt pretty bad and did not look too good at all, so I raced her to the doctors who said to take her to hospital."

Doctors at Casey Hospital assumed it was gravel stuck up her nose, and said they couldn't book her in for the necessary procedure to get it out for five days.

"They say you've got a mother's instinct and you do," Brooke said. "If you know there's something wrong with your child, there's something wrong."

She took Shaylee straight to the Royal Children's Hospital instead where they discovered it was a battery, and immediately removed it.

In just a couple of days it had started to corrode, burning into Shaylee's septum and causing a nasty infection.

Southern Health has apologised to Shaylee's family in a formal letter, and says it will investigate the matter to make sure it doesn't happen again.