Windsor mother warns of potential hazards button batteries may pose to children

CTV Windsor: Potential button battery hazards A Windsor mother wants parents to know the potential hazards button batteries pose to young children. Michelle Maluske has more.

A Windsor mother wants parents to know the potential hazards button batteries pose to young children.

Robin Ferguson learned the hard way how harmful button batteries can be after her then five-year-old son put the tiny power source up his nose.  With an unsuccessful try to remove the battery, Ferguson rushed her son to Windsor Regional Hospital.

Ferguson claims while waiting to be examined, her son’s nose became more and more agitated – eventually it started to bleed.

“I was just like, that does not look right. I asked, I said, should I be worried, that is a battery in his nose? And they're like no,” she says.

Ferguson says a nurse practitioner assuredher that the battery wouldn’t start breaking down for 24 hours. However, an American doctor says these types of batteries can cause damage much sooner.

Dr. Stacey Hail performed an experiment to show the dangers of these types of batteries. Hail placed a button battery inside a hotdog, and after 10 minutes, the battery started cooking the meat from the inside out.

Ferguson believes something similar happened to her son.

In a statement, hospital officials concede Duncan had to wait seven hours to get the battery removed and apologize for the wait. However, because sedation was necessary, the hospital says her son had to be moved to the resuscitation department, where there are only three beds generally used for life-saving treatments.

A month after the hospital visit, Ferguson says Duncan’s nose started to bleed frequently and produced a foul odour.

“To me it smelt like rotting flesh. You couldn't get within two feet of his face.”

After a visit to her paediatrician, Ferguson was redirected to a specialist. While Dr. Francis Ling declined to comment on the story to CTV Windsor, a report he compiled indicated that Duncan suffered “a septal perforation from liquefactive necrosis of the button battery”.

Ferguson says Ling did tell her even if the battery had come out quickly, it may not have prevented the damage to Duncan’s nose, which she has now accepted. Her frustration now lies in education.

In the letter to Ferguson, hospital administrators say they're taking Duncan's case as an educational tool to teach nurses and staff about the seriousness of these batteries.

Ferguson says she is happy with that and hopes the next time a patient comes in with a button battery either lodged in an ear or swallowed, they will get moved up the priority list.

Now six, Duncan and his family won’t know if he’ll require surgery to repair the hole in his noise until he’s older.