What if your child swallows a small object, like a button or lego or coin? You don’t necessarily need to panic.
It is ALWAYS concerning if
1) you don’t know what it is that was swallowed – i.e. the helpful older sibling report
2) you know it is/might be a button battery – that’s an emergency
3) you think your child has inhaled/breathed anything
4) your child is unwell or in pain in anyway
But if your GP or doctor or GP practice nurse advises you that it probably will – literally – just pass, do you still need to search through those poos for days to find it?
Probably not.
In 2019, 6 paediatricians – in the time-honoured traditions of doctors testing things on themselves – swallowed lego heads on purpose. So, what happened?
“Participants ingested a Lego head, and the time taken for the object to be found in the participants’ stool was recorded. The primary outcome was the Found and Retrieved Time (FART) score.
Results: The FART score averaged 1.71 days. There was some evidence that females may be more accomplished at searching through their stools than males, but this could not be statistically validated.
Conclusions: A toy object quickly passes through adult subjects with no complications. This will reassure parents, and the authors advocate that no parent should be expected to search through their child’s faeces to prove object retrieval.”
If you’re a science-minded mammy – you may enjoy reading this paper. One of my favourite medical papers ever written: https://
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