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Published: 2022-09-01 09:11:00 Updated: 2022-09-01 09:24:22
Posted September 1, 2022 9:11 a.m. EDT Updated September 1, 2022 9:24 a.m. EDT
Barberton, Ohio — A family is sharing the story of their 3-year-old who swallowed a small, round battery. They gave her honey to help slow the damage.
Katie Jacobsen's birthday on Thursday was one she'll never forget. The mom of eight children had just ordered dinner from Cracker Barrel to eat at their home when her 3-year-old daughter Maggie told her she swallowed something shiny.
"I saw the Barbie doll that she'd been playing with, and she'd been playing with my 8-year-old son," Jacobsen described. "They were kind of sitting around the coffee table together, and his eyes got real big. And he looked at me and he said, 'I just took one of those out.'"
The Barbie doll Maggie was playing with had a damaged battery compartment that opened. Jacobsen started to panic, getting ready to take Maggie to Akron Children's Hospital.
"Meanwhile, my 16-year-old is just kind of sitting there," Jacobsen said. "I'm walking around getting ready, and I can hear her in the background saying, 'Mom, we have to give her honey,' and my husband said, 'Oh, we've got packets of honey on the table right here.'"
The Cracker Barrel meal they'd ordered came with biscuits and a lot of honey.
"So I sat in the back right by her with her car seat," Jacobsen said. "And I just kept giving her honey ... we took the extra packets with us and I just kept giving her more packets of honey on the way."
An X-ray confirmed Maggie did ingest a battery. Luckily, it was in her stomach, not her esophagus.
Dr. Joseph Iocono is a pediatric general thoracic surgeon who said he unfortunately sees this all of the time. He said time is of the essence when it happens.
"It can erode through the first layer of the esophagus," Iocono said. "The mucosa within a couple of hours."
That's why its important to take children who swallow objects immediately to the hospital for an X-ray. If a child is a year or older, Iocono said you can slow down the erosion process with honey.
"Not only did the honey stop the conduction or slow the conduction of the battery, but also [helped] it pass through," he explained. "If you have honey in the house, you can give them a teaspoon a couple of teaspoons every 10 to 20 minutes."
While Maggie was admitted over night for testing, the battery passed even further down her intestine, where it's not as much of a threat, so she was released.
Jacobsen shared her story on Facebook in hopes of helping someone else.
"I have lots of friends who have young kids, and I just wanted to tell them," she said. "I'm just willing to suffer a little bit of embarrassment to say, 'Hey, if this ever happens to you, this is what you should do.'"
In just a few days her post has been shared nearly 200,000 times. Parents are now thanking her and sharing their own similar stories.
New data released in a report from the Academic Journal of Pediatrics shows that the problem appears to be growing in the United States. Twice as many emergency room visits related to children ingesting small batteries were reported from 2010 to 2019 when compared with the decade before, with the majority of those visits for kids less than five years old.
if a child is suspected of swallowing a battery, they should be taken to a medical professional as soon as possible.
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