2-year-old accidentally swallows 8 needles: ‘I was focused on my work’

A child swallowing something dangerous is every parent’s nightmare. 

Luckily for mom Narly Olórtegui Pisco of Peru, her 2-year-old son is OK after he accidentally swallowed needles on the farm where Pisco works, Jam Press reported. 

The boy was rushed last week from the farm in the province of Mariscal Cáceres to Hospital II-2 in Tarapoto for life-saving surgery.

An X-ray of his abdomen revealed eight needles, which were removed by medics in just under 2 hours.

“Getting them out cost me a little, but we did it with the support of the Lord. We even managed to get the bottom ones out,” surgeon Efrain Salazar Tito told CEN.

In a statement, the regional government noted there were two needles in the peritoneum (which lines the abdominal cavity) on the right side; three on the left side; one in the abdominal wall; and two others “dangerously situated” between the bladder and the rectum.

Pisco expressed her gratitude for the doctors who saved her son’s life. “If it had not been for their timely surgical intervention, his health would have worsened, and the outcome would have been different,” she told Jam Press.

A single mom, Pisco said she took her son to work with her because she had no one else to look after him.

She said she didn’t notice he swallowed the needles because she was busy at her job.

It is believed they were used for injecting livestock at the farm.

“I didn’t realize because I was focused on my work,” Pisco said, per CEN. “Sometimes children put anything in their mouths when they crawl or when they begin to walk.”

Doctors treated the small lesions in the boy’s small intestine.

He was temporarily placed on a liquid-only diet and discharged from the hospital several days later.

Medics reported the incident to local authorities because they couldn’t comprehend how the boy could have swallowed so many needles.

They suspected he might have been mistreated, CEN reported.

An investigation is ongoing.

Kids being rushed to the ER for swallowing foreign objects happens all the time.

Recently, one 4-year-old boy’s pain was traced to a magnetic bracelet in his stomach.