Bizarre reason why boy swallowed 11 magnetic balls
A mum has offered a bizarre reason for why her little boy ingested magnetic balls that ruptured his small intestine.
Yang Zhiyu, 6, is believed to have found the rusty metal magnets at a bicycle repair shop near his home in Pingxiang City in China’s east.
The boy’s parents took him to Hunan Children’s Hospital after he complained of stomach pain and doctors discovered the magnetic balls in his bowels on September 1.
His mum, identified only as Ms Tseng, said doctors recommended having surgery but the boy’s parents wanted an alternative to having an operation.
General surgeon Peng Yuming said X-ray scans showed 11 magnets and two metal blocks bundled together in the boy’s small intestine, which had been torn in three places as a result of the cluster of metal rubbing against each other.
Due to the intestinal perforations, doctors were forced to operate on Zhiyu in order to repair the damage.
They successfully removed the rusty magnets and the boy is on the road to recovery.
“These magnetic balls are very dangerous,” Dr Peng said.
“When a child swallows them, they cause perforated intestines 99 per cent of the time.”
As for why he did it, his mum said her son wanted to prove his bravery.
“He said he wanted to experiment, to prove that he wasn’t a scaredy-cat,” she said.
She and her husband said their boy liked to imitate cartoons, and they believe he was copying a video showing someone swallowing a magnet and successfully retrieving it using another outside their body.
“We’re going to have to stop him from watching TV now,” Ms Tseng said.
“We usually tell him not to eat strange things whenever we spot him doing it, but who knew he would swallow metal?”
Dr Peng said Zhiyu would need at least 10 days of bed rest before he could be discharged.
Australscope
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