Two Bits – Then she swallowed her hearing aids . . .

A good friend of mine had a very unfortunate accident with her hearing aids. She had climbed into bed quite late one night, getting ready to go to sleep, when she realised her husband was talking to her.

She wanted to hear him, so reached out for her hearing aids lying on the bedside table. She admits that she is easily distracted, which may explain what happened next.

“As I reached for them with one hand, I saw my pills lying on the bedside table and realised I had forgotten to take them. So I picked the pills up with the other hand.”
Imagine this: she is sitting up in bed, hearing aids in one hand, pills in the other, and now has to reach for a glass of water to swallow the pills. The hearing aids, by the way, are those little pink ones that fit inside the ear – about the size of a piece of bubble gum.

“Without thinking, I put the pills into the hand with the hearing aids, got the glass of water, popped everything into my mouth and swallowed the lot, washing them down with water!”

At this point she remembered she had wanted to listen to what her husband was saying, so looked around for her hearing aids.

“I looked and looked, then my husband helped me to look, and we could not find them anywhere. Gradually it dawned on me that maybe I had swallowed them with the pills.”

She started to panic, because only a few months ago she read an article about someone who had died after swallowing hearing aid batteries. She tried to induce vomiting, but that did not work. She called her doctor, who told her to get to Alberlito and have an X-ray right away.

And so the X-ray revealed two little hearing aids sitting snugly inside her. Unfortunately, perhaps because she had drunk a lot of water while trying to vomit, the little things had left the stomach and were now in her intestine. They could have been fairly easily removed from her stomach but now that they were in the gut the only solution was surgery.

“So they called in a surgeon and an anaesthetist, and at midnight I was cut open and they recovered the hearing aids,” said my friend.

And not a moment too soon.

“The surgeon said one battery was already blackened (presumably from stomach acids) and the other one had started to leak. I really could have died!”

The tiny batteries that power so many things in our lives, from hearing aids to security remotes to watches and children’s toys, contain lithium which is poisonous. While many first aid advice forums say that, if swallowed, the batteries should pass through the system within 48 hours, the fatal danger is if they get stuck in the gut and leak or burst.

There have been recorded deaths from swallowing lithium batteries, mainly in small children, because they are so small and look like sweets. Fair to say the majority have been when the batteries have stuck in the food pipe and burned the membrane, but some from damage further in the gut when they have stuck in the intestine. That there haven’t been many deaths in adults that I could find in a cursory internet search, is perhaps because adults don’t stick everything in their mouths as much as toddlers do. I don’t know, but the photos of damage caused to infants are horrific.

“I can’t tell you how stupid I feel,” mourned my friend. “Now I have to lie in bed and spend months recovering from surgery all because of one silly mistake. I am so cross with myself!”

What makes her even crosser is that almost everyone she has told the story to has thought it incredibly funny. Perhaps one day she will see the funny side, but she’s not ready yet! I took that as a sign that I shouldn’t make remarks about her having really bright ideas lately!

In fact she almost didn’t want to tell me about it, but I persuaded her that it must serve as a warning to others, particularly parents of small children, to be very careful with lithium batteries.

I asked Patricia Schröder of local recycling company Reclite what one should do with old batteries. She says legislation is currently being prepared that may force battery manufacturers to have schemes whereby the public may dispose of their old batteries at convenient collection points. Some shopping centres, like Cresta in Jo’burg, do have collection points already for batteries and mercury lights.

“I would like to persuade local shopping centres and supermarkets to let us provide collection boxes, but it is a slow process. There is a small cost to the recycling process to make the batteries harmless, which I would like to persuade large retailers to make part of their social responsibility programs, which I am working on.”

What is interesting, Patricia says, is that the Consumer Protection Act says that customers may take an electrical product back to the store they bought it from, and ask the store to dispose of it, which they are obliged to do.

So, bottom line is: lithium batteries are dangerous, they do go into landfills and eventually leach into the water supply, but there is no law against that happening at the moment. However, you should do everything you can to avoid small children (and deaf old dears!) accidently swallowing them.

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Last week my end of column joke fell flat because the punch line was chopped off. It should have read “Donald!!” “Duck!”
In Spain, there is a tradition after a bullfight to serve the mayor the bull’s testicles.
One day after a bullfight, the mayor asks the waiter: “Funny, why are they so small today?”
The waiter: “Today, sir, the bull won.”