Page 7 - IAV Digital Magazine #555

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Doctors Remove 50 AA And AAA Batteries From Woman’s Gut And Stomach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDyAy5G96Wo
Doctors in Ireland removed 50 bat- teries from a woman’s gut and stomach after she swallowed them in an apparent act of deliberate self- harm.
The woman, 66, was treated at St. Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin after ingesting an initially “unknown number” of cylin- drical batteries, according to a report of the case, published Thursday (Sept. 15) in the Irish Medical Journal. An X-ray revealed
a multitude of bat- teries in her abdomen, although thankful- ly none appeared to be obstructing her gastrointesti- nal (GI) tract and no batteries showed signs of structural dam- age.
The treatment team initially took a “conservative” approach, mean- ing they observed the patient closely to see if and how many batteries would pass through the GI tract on their own. Over a one-week period, she
passed five A A batteries, but X- rays taken over the following three weeks showed that the vast majority of the batteries had failed to continue progressing through her body. By this time, the patient was expe- riencing diffuse abdominal pain.
The woman then underwent a laparotomy, in which surgeons made an incision to access her abdominal cavity. They found that the stomach, pulled down by
the weight of the batteries, had become distend- ed and stretched into the area above the pubic bone. The team then cut a small hole in the stom- ach and removed 46 batteries from the organ; these included both A A and AAA batter- ies.
Four additional batteries, stuck in the colon, were “milked” into the rectum and removed through the anus — this brought the total number of ingest- ed batteries to 55.
A final X-ray scan then confirmed that the woman’s GI tract was offi- cially battery-free and she went on to have an “uneventful recov- ery.”
“To the best of our knowledge, this case repre- sents the highest reported number of batteries ingested at a sin- gle point in time,” the doctors wrote in their case report.
Most cases of battery ingestion published in med- ical journals describe instances in which a child has swallowed small, button-style bat- teries, the report notes. “The delib- erate ingestion of multiple large A A batteries as a form of deliberate self-harm is an unusual presenta- tion,” the doctors reported.
In these more- common cases of pediatric battery ingestion, the bat- teries can some- times pass through a child’s
body without causing damage. But if they get stuck in the throat, they can cause severe and even life-threaten- ing injuries, according
to UCSF’s Benioff Children’s Hospitals. That’s because saliva jumpstarts an electric current in the trapped bat- teries, triggering a chemical reaction that burns the esophagus and can lead to severe tissue damage and bleeding.
Swallowing larger, cylindrical batter- ies can also pres- ent these dan- gers, as well as the risk of chemi- cal leakage from the batteries and GI tract obstruc- tion, Live Science previously report- ed.
“The potential of cylindrical batter- ies to result in acute surgical emergencies should not be underestimated,” the case report states.
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