CHENNAI: A team of doctors from Rela Hospital saved a four-year-old boy from Chennai who had accidentally swallowed an AA battery while playing with it, which got stuck inside his stomach.
The expert team headed by Dr R Ravi, group director and senior gastroenterologist, Rela Hospital, removed the battery successfully following the endoscopy method of inserting a tube fixed with Roth Net through the boy’s mouth.
The battery was removed within 14 hours of ingestion.
Arvind (name changed) was rushed to a nearby hospital by his parents. Considering the level of complications after seeing the X-ray, he was directed to Rela Hospital, Chromepet.
After careful examinations, the team of gastroenterologists found that the battery was in the stomach. Due to the large size of the battery, removal by endoscopy was challenging as the battery had to be aligned vertically or else it would have caused injury to the child’s food pipe.
“Even for an adult, the size of the battery is too large. We wonder how the child swallowed it. The bigger the foreign body that is ingested, the higher the complication to remove. So, in this situation we did an endoscopy using Roth Net and took a considerable amount of time to retrieve the battery without causing slightest damage to his internal organs,” explained Dr Ravi.
After the endoscopy and subsequent observation, the kid is back to normal. In fact, he had a portion of food within two hours after the procedure, and he was discharged on the same day.
According to the doctors, if the boy hadn’t mentioned the accident to his parents and had the battery been left inside his stomach, it could have been eroded by the acid inside the stomach and possibly become life threatening.
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