Woman issues urgent warning after daughter nearly dies eating bacon and egg roll due to little-known hazard

A nice little bacon and egg roll (or bap, or butty, or balm, or whatever else) seems like a nice simple harmless treat.

However, a quick hot snack took a dark turn for this kid in Australia.

And now her mum is issuing an urgent warning following the brush with death.

Yes, it’s genuinely that serious.

A mum, from Newcastle, New South Wales, took to Facebook after her daughter’s innocent bites of bacon and egg landed her in hospital.

The mum explained that the child had such a bad injury she ended up being flown by helicopter from a Newcastle hospital to one in Sydney.

Kristen Saunders/Facebook

Writing on social media, she explained that while snacking on the roll, she ended up swallowing a piece of wire from a brush used to clean barbecues.

She explained to the ABC Newcastle radio station that her daughter was ‘munching away’ on the roll from a local sausage sizzle before ‘she started to feel like she was choking’.

“I think like most parents, we're like, ‘You'll be fine, have some water, it'll settle down’,” she said.

And when she took her to the doctors, the problem wasn’t found.

However, the nine-year-old still had a sore throat and was struggling with solid foods and things kept getting worse.

“There was this one particular day I was at home with her and all of a sudden she was a bit confused answering questions,” the mum said.

“I was like, ‘Hang on, there's something really problematic here’ and called the GP – she (said) go straight to the hospital.”

But when they did get her to the hospital, the little girl was stumbling and couldn’t even recognise her family.

Sam Mellish / In Pictures via Getty Images Images

Turns out that wire she had swallowed ‘pierced her oesophagus then pushed into the carotid artery of the neck’, according to Saunders’ Facebook post.

The nine-year-old ended up having major vascular and cardio thoracic surgery ‘then aspiration of brain abscesses’ before another ‘six weeks on IV antibiotics’.

At the hospital, brain abscesses were identified and a CT identified a ‘tiny bit of wire, sore of near her neck’.

The mum said: “There was a major infection in one of her arteries. They had to replace it and there was a risk of all these different things, so that was pretty awful.”

She’s now back in school and off the antibiotics, but the mum has warned other parents: "Please please please protect your family and friends and THROW OUT your wire BBQ grill brushes."

Topics: Australia, Food And Drink, Health, Parenting

Jess Battison

Jess is an Entertainment Journalist with a love of all things pop culture. Her main interests include keeping up with the Twitter girlies, waiting for a new series of The Traitors and losing her voice at a Beyoncé concert. She graduated with a first in Journalism from City, University of London in 2021 and has previously worked at MyLondon.

@jessbattison_