National Post

Two-year-old survives after swallowing pen
Montreal doctors have reported what may be the longest rigid foreign object ever retrieved from inside a young child – a 15-centimetre ballpoint pen that a two-year-old girl somehow managed to swallow.

An X-ray image of the toddler shows the faint but unmistakable outline of the writing implement, partly in her esophagus and partly in her stomach, extending about half the length of the child’s little body.

“The first thing that enters the head is ‘How on earth could she have swallowed something so long?,’ ” Dr. Lily Nguyen, the ear, nose and throat specialist who led the removal procedure, recalled in an interview. “I had initially thought it was physically impossible … The next thing I was worried about was that it would puncture through either the esophagus or the stomach, so we took her to the operating room very quickly.”