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Growing up, you would have definitely heard either your mum or dad tell you to stop trying to put inedible things in your mouth. In fear, most of us would have immediately dropped the curious object or spat it out.
One curious boy however, may have not gotten the memo…
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Rhiley Morrison has always loved science and unfortunately his passion caused him to spend six hours in surgery after he swallowed a bunch of magnetic balls.
The 12-year-old bot decided to ingest 54 magnetic balls as part of an experiment to see if he could get metal to stick to his stomach. He also wanted to know what they would look like when he went to the toilet.
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According to reports, the boy swallowed one batch of magnets on 1st January and a second on 4th January.
When the magnets didn’t pass through his system, Rhiley woke his mum up at 2am and told her that he had swallowed them by accident.
However, an x-ray showed that there were more than just two magnets in his stomach.
Doctors feared that the magnetic balls would burn through the 12-year-old’s organs and kill him, so they rushed him to surgery where he underwent a six-hour operation to remove them.
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For 10 days, the boy from Prestwich, Greater Manchester, UK, was unable to move without vomiting up a green liquid that was caused by his bowel leaking. Rhiley even had to be fed through a tube.
“Rhiley is massively into science, he loves experiments,” his mum Paige Ward shared. “He eventually admitted ‘I tried to stick magnets to me, I wanted to see if this copper would stick to my belly while the magnets were in.’”
“It’s just so silly, but he’s a child and that’s what kids do,” she added. “He also thought it would be fun seeing them come out the other end.”
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After over two weeks, Rhiley was released from the hospital.
“It was heartbreaking watching him go through all that, just horrible,” Paige said. “I think it’s especially difficult because of Covid because he couldn’t have any visitors.”
“It was horrible to see him not able to sit up and being so sick every time he moved because this fluid was sloshing around inside him,” she continued. “I’d managed to hold it together all the time but it wasn’t nice seeing him in that much pain.”
“When they tried to put the catherer in, he had pins and needles through his body and told me ‘I feel like my insides are going to explode,” Paige shared. “A trauma nurse came in and told me she deals with kids like Rhiley who’ve eaten magnets all the time.”
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Rhiley was incredibly lucky that he didn’t suffer through worse.
“Another doctor said he’d seen a child who’d swallowed two who ended up with part of their bowel removed so Rhiley was very lucky with 54,” Paige said.
Rhiley’s mum has since thrown out every magnet and magnetic toy she could find in her home.
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In case you or someone you know needs to be told, don’t swallow magnets or anything that’s not… food.
Do you know someone who’s swallowed a toy before? Let us know what happened!
Info via Metro