Abby Connolly
It had been between 7-10 days since his first visit to the ER when the boy’s condition started to worsen. So he arrived at the ER for a third visit at 4:30 am while Meghan was working.
“Now he’s having some fevers, and he’s not wanting to eat and drink,” explains Meghan. “We have no idea what’s going on with him.”
Meghan gave the boy a throat exam and noticed that he had some swelling near his right tonsil. He was also experiencing tenderness on the right side of his neck and still complained of ear pain.
Now that the new symptoms had appeared, Meghan explains that she and the other staff went “all out,” ordering a CAT scan of his neck area, including his ears, with contrast this time. They also ran a bunch of labs on him and ran every test they could think of.
“We got our answer on the CAT scan,” says Meghan.
Can you guess what was causing this little boy so much pain?
He had a two-centimeter-long metal wire lodged into his peritonsillar tissue on the right side. It caused an abscess to develop.
As it turns out, that small wire was a piece of a metal grill brush that must have fallen onto the grill his hamburger was cooked on all those days ago.
The metal bristle fell off the brush while the grill was being cleaned, stayed on the grill, and got cooked into the hamburger meat.
ENT surgeons operated on the boy, removing the wire and draining the abscess. He was given antibiotics, and his pain had gone away completely.
“Do not use grill brushes with metal wires,” says Meghan at the end of her video.
