A Girl Got Brain Disease from Eating a Sandwich Containing BBQ Brush Bristles
A 9-year-old Australian girl is fighting for her life, as danger was in her breakfast sandwich.
"They identified there were multiple abscesses on the brain," her mother, Kristen Saunders, told ABC Newcastle.
The freak accident happened in July after the girl bought a bacon-and-egg roll at a vendor in her hometown of Newcastle, New South Wales.
She was reportedly eating her food when suddenly, "she started feeling like she was choking," Saunders recalled. The mother didn't think much of it at first, perhaps thinking her daughter was eating too much and too fast.
"I think, like most parents, we thought, 'You'll be fine, have a little drink, the water will calm down,'" recalls the Australian, who assumed the problem would resolve itself.
The diagnosis initially seemed correct, and aside from a sore throat and difficulty swallowing food, the girl's condition seemed to improve soon after. She was even able to compete in the school's athletic carnival.
Not long after, the girl's health deteriorated. "One day I was at home with her, and all of a sudden, she was a bit confused answering questions," Saunders says.
Alarmed, the distraught parent called her doctor, who told her to immediately take her daughter to the emergency room.
But by the time she arrived, her daughter's condition had deteriorated to the point that she was stumbling, disoriented,d and unable to recognize her family, and medics later revealed that she had an abscess on her brain, Yahoo News Australia reported.
Doctors performed a last-minute CT scan, revealing the horrifying cause of the child's symptoms, where a small hair-like wire was in his neck.
The dangerous object was actually BBQ bristles.
BBQ bristles which were hiding in his breakfast sandwich. It had reportedly penetrated his esophagus and entered the carotid artery, the main vessel that supplies blood to the brain.
To address this, doctors had to replace the artery, drain the abscess in her brain, and other procedures that could have jeopardized her daughter's health. Thankfully, the surgery was successful, after which the patient was hospitalized for a month, where she recovered.
Despite the harrowing story, Saunders claims that her situation "could have been a lot worse."
"She's stopped all her antibiotics, she's back in school, she'll be back in sports soon," says the grateful guardian, who is now sharing her daughter's story to warn other parents about this dangerous threat.
"It's something that doesn't happen often, but it happens often enough, and I'd hate for anyone else to go through something like this," Saunders says.
\"It\'s something that doesn\'t happen often, but it happens often enough, and I\'d hate for anyone else to go through something like this,\" Saunders says.
