Kolkata doctors pull magnet from six-year-old's lung with a stronger magnet

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Surgeons at Kolkata Medical College and Hospital have removed a magnet lodged in a six-year-old boy's lung by sending in a second, stronger magnet — after forceps failed four times and the department had begun preparing to open his chest. The retrieval tool was made to order in a lathe workshop. The boy, identified as Arafat Ali from Maheshpur in Baduria, North 24 Parganas, was brought to the ENT outpatient department by his mother with persistent coughing and breathing difficulties; a CT scan and X-ray showed an amulet-shaped magnet that had passed down his airway into the right lung.

On Wednesday the team attempted removal by bronchoscopy. Associate professor Diptanshu Mukhopadhyay tried to grip the object with forceps four times; it slipped away each time. ENT department head Soumendranath Bandyopadhyay took over and failed as well. Doctors performed a tracheostomy, opening an alternative airway through the neck to keep the child breathing, but the magnet still would not come out. The department then considered transferring him to SSKM Hospital for a thoracotomy, an incision between the ribs to reach the chest cavity; by Thursday morning a paediatric intensive care bed there still had not been arranged.

The solution came from outside the hospital. Mukhopadhyay travelled to Maniktala, where lathe workshops operate, and showed a worker named Prabhakar Karar the X-ray of the magnet inside the lung. Karar judged from the image that the swallowed magnet was a weak piece of the kind used in toys, and proposed building a stronger one that could be attached to the tip of the medical forceps and attract the object out. He built it to the doctor's specifications. On Thursday afternoon, with the operation led by Bandyopadhyay and anaesthetists standing by, the magnet was fixed to the instrument and the technique worked.

Prabhakar Karar said he was happy that the magnet he had manufactured had helped save a child's life.