Russian doctors save boy who swallowed battery
Doctors in Yekaterinburg saved the life of a one-year-old boy whose gullet and trachea had been burnt by alkali from a swallowed battery.
The boy, named only as Yegor, was hospitalized in the town of Krasnoturinsk (the Sverdlovsk region of Russia) on suspicion of pneumonia. Doctors tried their best to cut the temperature down, but the condition of the little one was worsening. On the third day, they radiographed him and gasped with surprise – a foreign body stuck in the gullet of the baby. It became known that the playful baby boy had swallowed a battery from a remote control unit.
“The little boy arrived in a very poor condition, - doctor Irina Vinogradova says. – Alkali from the battery burnt a hole in the gullet and trachea. As a result, the walls of these neighbouring organs grew together. The boy could neither eat nor breathe normally: the food was penetrating into the trachea while the air was flowing into the digestive tract.
“Operations of this kind are performed in Russia very seldom – the complicated structure of trachea requires elaborate surgery, - Irina says. – The medical literature describes only three cases of such operations; two of them had a fatal outcome. We decided to take the risk, since the boy could die at any moment!”
The operation lasted for six hours. Surgeons disjoined the child’s trachea and gullet and sewed up the hole that the battery had burnt out. The boy was afterwards put into artificial sleep and connected to the respiration unit.
The little kid is fine now. The operation has been nominated as “The Operation of the Year”.
