Swallowed pin damages child's kidney

Children will put anything in their mouth, and usually this doesn’t cause serious harm.

For a 4-year-old boy in Saudi Arabia, swallowing a pin led to a perforated intestine, a pierced kidney and surgery to fix it all.

After a medical team operated to remove the pin, the boy recovered without further complications, according to the doctors who treated the boy at a government hospital in the Saudi Western Red Sea port of Jeddah.

"Children actually start exploring the world using their mouth as soon as they are able to pick up objects," said Dr. Yasmin Yousef, of the department of surgery at King Abdul Aziz Medical City, who treated the boy and co-authored the report of his case.

However, serious complications due to swallowed objects are really rare, because objects typically "pass through the gastrointestinal tract and end up in the diaper," she said in the report, published by the US Livescience website.

When the boy's parents brought him to the hospital where Yousef works, he had already been having pain in the upper right part of his abdomen for about three months.

He had also been experiencing fever and chills, the report said, adding that he had seen one doctor, who had diagnosed him with a urinary tract infection.

The doctor prescribed antibiotics, but the boy's condition had not improved much after he finished the medicine, the report said.

He had also been admitted to another medical facility, where an X-ray showed the bobby pin in his right upper abdomen.

At that time the boy had admitted to swallowing the object about a month before he started to experience his symptoms. But those doctors assured his parents that the bobby pin would pass through his urinary system.

“However, the boy's symptoms did not subside, and when he came to Yousef's hospital, a CT scan revealed that the bobby pin had become lodged in the boy's right kidney.

“The ends of the pin had rusted and become sharp, and the pin had pierced through the first section of the small intestine and penetrated deep into his kidney,” the report said.

"We have treated a few patients with complications due to swallowed disk batteries as well, but I have never encountered a foreign object that perforates the bowel and gets lodged in the kidney in my practice before," Yousef said.