After rushing her 10-year-old son to the hospital with what she assumed was a stomach bug, a mom discovered that he had actually swallowed several magnets.
When Peggy Westphal, of Oklahoma City, initially took her son, Brady, to see a doctor, everyone agreed that the little boy probably had a stomach virus.
However, when Brady still wasn’t feeling any better several days later, doctors decided to perform an X-ray that revealed something shocking.
Right there, in the middle of Brady’s stomach, were no less than eight magnets.
“These magnets, especially if swallowed at different times, the magnets don’t move all the way through the intestinal tract,” Dr. John Grunow explained, according to Pix 11. “And, then, they pinch together one to another, and the tissue in between gets pinched, and the blood supply gets lost. The tissue ultimately dies.”
Immediately after discovering the life-threatening magnets, doctors from the Children’s Hospital at Oklahoma University Medical Center sent Brady into surgery, where they were forced to remove three inches of his colon.
“I took a moment for myself. That’s when I broke down and cried, because I was glad that everything was okay,” Brady’s father, Shane Westphal, said. “It could have been a whole lot worse for him.”
