A story. This is real. This is what my family is like.

[xiphias]

A couple days ago, my mother listens to her answering machine. There's the cute little voice of my niece on it -- it's a new answering machine and the speaker isn't very good, and Winter uses this cute voice on answering machines which is a little too quiet sometimes.

It says something like, "Hi, Yaya, I love you, I went into the hospital because I ate penguins."

Mom isn't entirely sure that she's heard all the words exactly right, so she calls back. Yeah, she didn't hear the last word exactly right. . .

So, my niece Winter Rose is six. Her father gave her three pennies -- not three penguins, three PENNIES -- for doing such a good job on her chores. She couldn't reach her piggy bank, so naturally she kept them in her mouth.

When she finally gets to the piggy bank, she puts the penny in it.

She thinks about this, and explains that she put the three pennies in her mouth, and she put the one penny into the piggy bank, and Tony stays home with Drew as And takes Winter off the ER. They X-ray her stomach, and do, in fact, find a small metal disk in her stomach.

This is apparently not actually all that uncommon, and they suggest that they put Winter on clear liquids and come back the next day for another X-ray. They do, and discover TWO little metal disks!

(My sister's comment about this was, "Wow! A 100% return on investment in just one day! We should feed Winter pennies more often!")

Anyway, my sister had been keeping up with this story, and phoned And up the next day to ask how Winter was:

Leila: So, how's Winter doing?
And: No change.

Comments

let me guess.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

the doctor said, "This, too, shall pass"?

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

*wince*

and now....

[unquietsoul5.livejournal.com]

***GROAN ***

Re: and now....

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

All I can figure is that she has spent the past several years WAITING for an opportunity to use that line.

Re: and now....

[gilana]

So you think she, er, fed the kid the set-up on purpose?

[cellio]

What goes in must come out eventually. They can either trust in this or monitor. Personally, I wouldn't be too excited about getting the money back. :-)

(Did you see that story about the cow in India with the diamonds?)

Re: and now....

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Um. . . .

No.

[angelovernh.livejournal.com]

poor girlie..
but funny line!

[ailbhe]

I can't imagine a family seeking medical attention because the kid swallowed a few coins. Diamonds, yes, but not coins.

Re:

[goljerp]

Think of it this way: if you had a half-way decent health plan, would you take any chances with the health of your child?

I think that their response was actually quite... sensible.

Re:

[ailbhe]

Um, yes, I would. I'd let them out the door, send them to school, allow them to play with their friends in friends' houses, that kind of thing. I wouldn't seek professional medical attention for every scraped knee, even though a scraped knee could harbour infection - I would treat it at home with antiseptic and bandaid. Coin-swallowing, bead-swallowing and so on are very common, utterly harmless, and far lower down the worrying scale than exposing a growing child to unnecessary X-rays; they might *need* X-rays later, and I'd hate to be worried about over-exposure when I was also worried about a broken limb or a dangerous foreign body having been ingested.

Re:

[goljerp]

I guess everyone has their own level of comfort and of knowledge. I, for example, didn't know that coin-swallowing was very common and utterly harmless before reading this thread. So I would've taken the child to get medical attention.

You're right, of course, about unnecessary X-rays. Perhaps we should be blaming the doctor(s) for taking them - after all, if all the child had swallowed was a penny, and that's utterly harmless, what was the point of the X-ray? (Other than the cool "look at the penny in the stomach" aspect). But that's not the fault of the parents, that's the fault of the doctors (unless the parents insisted).

Re:

[ailbhe]

It's amazing how much common knowledge isn't ("But everybody knows you have to throggle the frobnitz before you squoo the flib to the wikkiwikki!") - and yes, it *is* the doctor's fault that the child received an unnecessary X-ray; I believe that doctors sometimes find distressed parents hard to resist. And one unnecessary X-ray is unlikely to kill the child, too. (I wonder why they didn't use ultrasound?)

I didn't start thinking in terms of "fault" and "blame" until your response, though - I was busy being baffled. "Fault" and "blame" aren't hugely useful in a situation with no negative outcome.

Re:

[goljerp]

I wonder why they didn't use ultrasound?

I'll ask a friend of mine who's finishing up his Radiology residency. I suspect the answer comes down to hospital economics and the fact that the radiologists prefer to look at X-ray films rather than going to the patient, interacting with them, and analyzing the ultrasound results. Also, I think that the X-ray technicians do the dirty work of taking the X-rays and developing the film, while ultrasounds are done by doctors or nurses.

I probably shouldn't have used "fault" or "blame" either - it's words like that that make hospitals order X-rays for things like swallowed pennies... after all, the (small) bad effects of X-rays don't show up for years, while if by some bizarre happenstance a child became seriously injured by that penny and the hospital didn't order lots of tests, they could be sued.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

Groan. Ugh.

My mom swallowed a quarter once, due to a prank by one of my cousins. They never did find it. The worst part was that for a while, she could feel it in there...

Re:

[(Anonymous)]

They didn't use an ultra sound because: a) where was the coin now? would have to spend a lot of time LOCATING coins, and b) this is a small rural hospital that has a limited staff.

for the record, the child was not driven to the emergency room in a state of panic over this incident, but rather the doctor ( a pediatrician) was called, SHE suggested the Xray to make sure there was no damage. There was a second Xray to see if they have moved. I was not distressed, as the kid was breathing, and able to tell me what happened. Having lived through worse than this, I was more annoyed that this ruined our tight schedule for the evening.

The concern is if the body does not pass the coins, what they may do to the body. the surgical consult stated that after 6 weeks, then they would considering 'getting' the coins. so, 6 weeks is safe.

My concern for the potential damage that XRays cause is limited. No, I wouldn't do it daily for fun, but it was important to make sure the coin had not damaged anything.

as for what is unnecessary?? Who can say? SOme people believe that vaccines are unnecessary. I would rather have an extra Xray, than an un-needed surgery.

-The Mom involved

Re:

[(Anonymous)]

*** Oooh, also forgot to mention the PAIN the child was complaining about.....

Re:

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

:(

How's she doing now, though?

Re:

[goljerp]

Ok, my friend the Radiology Resident finally got back to me. I asked him a hypothetical question that just happened to have major similarities to this situation. He answered, without hesitation, that the X-ray was the thing to do. A penny stands out like a sore thumb on an X-ray, while the ultrasound would take at least an hour and probably wouldn't be able to detect a penny stuck in the esophagus, which is the real worry. (Air interferes with ultrasound.) Also, in an ultrasound, an air bubble and a penny look very similar.

He mentioned that MRI would also pick up the penny sans radiation, but that he would not suggest that, because a hypothetical 6-year old would need to be sedated, and the sedation would be much more dangerous than the radiation from an X-ray. Oh, and it's also lots more expensive than an X-ray.

We then started talking about how CT scans are overprescribed, especially in children, and he was telling me about how there often isn't enough attention paid to the amount of radiation in those scans -- my friend prefers ultrasounds in many cases instead of CT.