This Marseille family will remember their Christmas. Their 14-month-old daughter accidentally inhaled a fairy light bulb that ended up in her lungs.
- The inhalation of an object is the passage in the airways of a foreign body through the mouth (or more rarely through the nose), often favored by a sudden and deep inspiration (fear, surprise, sob, coughing fit. ..).
- It occurs more frequently in young children (toys, marbles, decorations, etc.) and if the object completely blocks the airways, the major risk is asphyxiation.
- This story may recall another case we reported in 2019: that of a 9-month-old girl who was taken to the emergency room, this time because of the ingestion of a plastic Christmas star.
If your Christmas party did not go as you wished, the story of this family from the Marseille region will give you some perspective. In 2017, when they had gathered to celebrate Christmas, the party took a dramatic turn.
The youngest of the family, aged 14 months, began to fall ill on December 23, two days before Christmas. Coughing, sneezing, difficult and wheezing breathing… The parents are not more alarmed than that, since the little girl has already suffered from similar symptoms. They still make an appointment with their doctor, who tells them that the child’s breathing is very abnormal, but that there is no respiratory distress.
Three weeks later, his condition still hasn’t improved.
However, three weeks after being treated with anti-asthmatic drugs, her condition has still not improved, contrary to what can be observed during a common winter viral infection. The parents therefore resolve to take their daughter to the Timone University Hospitals in Marseille. to have her auscultated.
She passes a chest x-ray to the doctors of the pediatric pulmonology department. And there is the surprise: the images reveal a U-shaped object that lodged in the left bronchus. The interns then understand that the object is actually a light garland bulb! And that she is the cause of the little girl’s respiratory problems.
Object sniffing: a matter for parents to take seriously
Doctors therefore remove the SLE from the lungs of the very young patient using a bronchoscopy performed under general anesthesia. Symptoms disappear immediately afterwards. Returning home, the parents discover that a light bulb is missing from the light garland decorating their Christmas tree. No one is quite sure how, but their 14-month-old daughter managed to inhale the tiny bulb, presumably through her nostrils.
Finally, more fear than harm in this story, which could have ended in a much more dramatic way. Indeed, with the diseases prevalent in children during the winter with similar symptoms, such as cough or difficulty breathing, doctors could have confused this unusual case with a classic respiratory infection. Above all, bronchial inhalations of small objects are sometimes fatal in young children: several cases of children who died following the inhalation of Christmas decorations have been described in the medical literature. But an inhalation of a Christmas bulb is a case that remains extremely rare. Only one other similar case has been identified in China.
