2-year-old Saudi girl saved after swallowing 27 toy magnets

With quick intervention, the surgical team specializing in infants and newborns at the Maternity and Children Hospital in Hafr Al-Batin (eastern Saudi Arabia) managed, on Tuesday, 24 May, to save the life of a two-year-old girl who had been suffering from abdominal pain with continuous vomiting for more than two weeks.

X-ray images showed the presence of 27 small magnetic balls inside the girl's intestine, which led to the formation of 8 holes in the intestinal wall. It turned out that the girl swallowed the magnets from a toy she was playing with.

The child's constant pain entailed the need for a quick surgical intervention to extract the magnetic pieces and sew the intestinal holes caused by the magnets' presence inside the digestive tract for a prolonged period.

The operation, which took three and a half hours to perform, was successful. The girl was discharged from the hospital after her condition stabilized, and she is now in good health.