A pediatrician's TikTok video has gone STUPID viral, chalking up 36 million views and counting after she shared one of "the most interesting cases" she's seen in her career.
Dr. Meghan Martin, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, explained that a four-year-old boy who had been eating food at a barbecue was brought to the emergency room because he was "complaining of ear pain."
After a full exam, the child was sent home with instructions to follow up with a pediatrician and ear-nose-throat specialist.
However, several days later, the boy came back to the ER at 4:30 a.m. with a wicked fever, and not wanting to eat or drink anything. The child had some swelling of the tonsil area and tenderness in the neck on the right side.
The docs had "no idea what was going on with him," Martin said. So they did a CAT scan, which is when the culprit was revealed...
The scan revealed a two-centimeter metal wire lodged in the kid's throat, and an abscess had begun to form around it.
"He had been eating a hamburger when this happened," Martin said. "So, the grill brush — the metal wires on the grill brush — had become lodged in the hamburger and when he ate the hamburger, it got lodged in the soft tissues."
A stinking metal wire grill brush! We all use those!
The boy went to the operating room with the ear, nose and throat surgeons, who were able to remove the metal wire. Martin said if the wire had remained inside the boy's body, there would have been an enlarging abscess or pocket of infection that would have spread and caused other problems – potentially major problems.
The boy was started on some antibiotics and his pain was completely resolved.
The doc warned viewers in her massively viral video:
"Do not use grill brushes with metal wires. There's not only the risk that it can get lodged in the soft tissues in your throat, but they can also cause bowel obstructions and perforations in the abdomen if accidentally swallowed."
Me rn:
Here is the original TikTok vid in case you want to watch it for yourself and also give some of your personal info to the CCP.
