A five-year-old boy from Tiruvallur district was recently operated on at Sri Ramachandra Hospital after swallowing an LED bulb nearly a month ago.
He was brought to the outpatient ward of the hospital on Friday with breathing difficulty and refractory cough, a hospital release said.
“The mother had seen him playing with some toy. He told her that he had swallowed the toy,” said R. Madhu, head of paediatric surgery at the hospital. “We admitted the child and did a CT scan. We found a foreign object in the lung passage. We told the patient’s family that we had to remove it,” he added.
The boy had been admitted twice earlier in another hospital where efforts to remove the bulb through bronchoscopy had failed and the doctors advised an open surgery. The family had refused.
“We also told them that open surgery may be required, and the family agreed,” Dr. Madhu said.
It took the surgeons nearly two hours to remove the object. “It was 5x2 cm LED bulb. We had to rotate it inside the lung passage, as we did not want to break the glass. It was difficult but we managed to remove it. If it had broken, we would have had to go for an open surgery,” the surgeon explained.
He did not require ICU or ventilator support. “It was done free of cost for the child through the Chief Minister’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme,” Dr. Madhu said.
The anaesthesia department, headed by Aruna Parameswari, helped in the procedure, the release said.
