Popular children’s toy lands four-year-old in emergency room

A popular children’s toy landed a Sydney family in the emergency room when their little girl accidentally swallowed it.

Chloe Ngyuen was playing with magnetic balls at her home in Cabramatta West when she burst into tears.

“I looked at her hand and she was holding a bunch of these magnet balls and I said, Chloe, did you swallow that?” her dad, Bill Nguyen, told 9News.

When she finally calmed down, Chloe admitted she’d accidentally swallowed “one” of her older sister Claire’s “magnetic balls”.

Her mum asked her what colour it was, and the little girl told her: “rainbow”.

She was taken to the Children’s Hospital at Westmead where an x-ray showed why Chloe thought the toy was multi-coloured.

“We were like, oh my god, eight of them, how did she swallow eight of them?” mum Amy Ngyuen said.

The magnets were still in her stomach and able to be removed with a camera inserted down her throat.

But her parents were told they were lucky they realised early, because if the marbles had made it into her bowel the situation would have been much more serious.

“If they come apart or a loop of bowel gets caught up between them, you could end up with a bowel perforation and that can be a life-threatening emergency,” Dr Michael Storman, head of gastroenterology at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead said.