Mum’s desperate warning after son ends up in hospital due to popular toy
A mum has issued a warning after her toddler swallowed parts of a toy and had to be rushed to the emergency room.
Martina Hodgson’s son Reggie, 3, from Nottingham in central England’s Midlands region, woke up on Tuesday “sick, grey in colour” and struggling to stay awake.
Ms Hodgson wrote on Facebook she thought Reggie might have a bug. She took him to hospital and they told her he was “severely dehydrated”.
“I couldn’t understand as he never stops drinking, they decided to do some further tests and sent him for an X-ray and that was when they realised the problem,” she wrote.
“The X-ray showed that he had swallowed some little magnetic balls. My heart sank. I knew exactly what they were: his older brother's toy magnets.”
An hour later and Reggie was rushed to another hospital via ambulance.
“Throughout the ambulance ride I could see he was deteriorating,” Reggie’s mum wrote.
She said Reggie sedated for three hours from 7.15pm as the doctors “worked on him”.
“It was the longest three hours of my life as I didn’t know what damage had been done.”
Ms Hodgson wrote doctors found several magnetic balls lodged in Reggie’s body – causing holes in his intestines and bending his bowel.
His bowel was where the main obstruction occurred with six balls lodged together inside. Doctors had to cut them out.
“The surgeons came to see me – I was so worried I had been pacing the floor going out of my mind,” the mum wrote.
“They told me they had managed to save his bowel, but he's had lots of work done to it as there were lots of holes and these all needed repairing.
“He’s still not completely out of the woods as a leakage could happen. I don't even know when he swallowed these magnets but the surgeon seems to think they have been there a while as they had started to corrode inside him and were poisoning Reggie.”
Ms Hodgson wrote Reggie is lucky to still have his bowel. It turns out he swallowed 19 of the balls.
She shared her story as a warning to parents about the dangers of the small magnets.
“These silly little things are dangerous and I wouldn't want anybody else to feel the way I have the past days,” she wrote.
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