Child’s missing necklace found in lungs
07/05/2012 03:42
Doctors at Emek Medical Center in Afula were surprised to find the three-year-old had swallowed her necklace.
X-ray of necklace ingested by 3-year-old Photo: Emek Medical Center
A woman in the Jezreel Valley thought her three-year-old daughter had misplaced
a thin necklace she had given her and gave it up for lost. But when the girl
began to cough and lost her appetite, doctors at Emek Medical Center in Afula
were surprised to find that she had swallowed it, with it moving to her trachea
and into the bronchi of her lungs.
When she was admitted to the emergency
room over the weekend, she was sent for an X ray, which showed the necklace. Dr.
Lev Shleizerman and Dr. Limor Binyamini of the ear-nose-and-throat department
were called it and decided to perform surgery under general anesthesia to
prevent the toddler from choking.
But in the surgical theater, they
decided to first try to remove the metal chain with a bronchoscopy via her mouth
into her respiratory system and managed to pull it out.
The chairman of
the pediatrics A department, Dr. Yosef Horovitz, said that doctors have become
used to finding foreign objects in the respiratory and digestive system of
children, but finding a necklace stuck in the bronchi of both lungs was a rare
occurrence that threatened her breathing.