Girl Hospitalized After Swallowing Button Battery
A four-year-old girl was taken to the hospital after swallowing a button battery from a broken electronic tracking device. This device was bought by her mother, Lisa Marie, to enhance family safety during a trip to Disneyland.
During the Disneyland visit with her four kids, Lisa noticed that the $29 trackers, which were about the size of Oreos, were malfunctioning. Frustrated, she decided to put them in the glove compartment of her car, planning to get them repaired later.
Once they returned home to Vancouver Island, Canada, the neglected trackers were forgotten in the car. One day, however, Lisa heard a gulping noise from the backseat. Her daughter, Lily, had managed to grab the device and, in a shocking moment, said she swallowed a quarter.
An X-ray at the hospital revealed a more serious truth: it was actually a button battery she ingested.
Lisa expressed her fear, saying, “As a mom, when we figured out it was a button battery, I was like, okay, her whole insides are burned out. I was on the bathroom floor of the hospital crying.”
Swallowing a button battery is indeed a grave medical emergency. Once it enters the body, the moist environment in the throat can complete a circuit between the battery’s terminals. This triggers a chemical reaction, producing sodium hydroxide, a corrosive substance capable of burning and liquefying nearby tissues.
This chemical can cause severe damage in just a few hours if it reaches the esophagus, and if it moves to the digestive tract, it can lead to further complications, including infections.
The small trackers that Lisa bought are common gadgets designed for tracking various items, from electronics to luggage and even children.
“Disneyland is scary, so I bought them to track my kids,” Lisa said. “The things I thought would keep my kids safe actually caused harm.”
Generally cautious, Lisa had always been careful about battery safety around her children, having issued warnings about button batteries just two weeks before the incident. She never thought her kids would open the glove box and reach for the small tags.
Fortunately, the button battery Lily swallowed didn’t stay in her esophagus, which prevented potential chemical burns. But the X-ray showed that it had moved into her bowel, a perilous situation nonetheless.
Doctors opted against performing surgery on her, which would have been risky and invasive. Instead, they sent the family home with laxatives to encourage the battery’s natural passage.
“I was giving her laxatives and all kinds of things to try and get this thing out,” Lisa recalled. “I had her bouncing on trampolines, using a vibration plate, eating prunes—everything.”
The anxiety weighed heavily on the family. Lily’s siblings wondered if their sister would survive, while Lisa tried every method to speed up the process. After four long days, Lily finally passed the battery.
Lisa said, “I wouldn’t want that to happen to anybody else. It was very scary. If you have any toys that have button batteries in them, just throw them out.”
This isn’t an isolated incident. In 2020, a two-year-old boy named Johnathan Huff fell ill at daycare after swallowing a button battery. Initially believed to be a viral illness, he sadly suffered a fatal seizure days later.
Afterward, an autopsy found a small button battery lodged in his intestines, leading to a massive hemorrhage as a result of the corrosive damage caused by the battery.
His mother, Jackie, recalled the panic, stating, “It immediately felt like it was something we had done. We were desperately trying to figure out where this battery had come from.” This horrifying experience has become more common; poison control receives around 3,000 calls yearly about children ingesting button batteries. Research shows more than 70 deaths associated with these batteries, but the true numbers remain underestimated, as many incidents go unreported.
