8-year-old girl gets tongue stuck in water bottle

 

An eight-year-old cheerleader who needed doctors to “yank and pull” a water-bottle stuck on her tongue for more than eight hours last week may be suffering from nerve damage.
And now her mother, Shantay Small, says parents and manufacturers should pay more attention to the dangers common metal water bottles with small openings pose to young children.
Jayla Small was at cheerleading practice last Thursday when she took three sips from a red bottle she uses all the time.
On the third sip, her tongue got stuck.

“The harder she pulled, the stronger the suction got,” her mother told the Daily News.
Paramedics were called to the cheer practice, but couldn’t remove the bottle. The girl was then driven to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston.
But even at the hospital, the seemingly harmless water bottle — by then so far back on Jayla’s tongue that her mother said it was near her wisdom teeth — stumped doctors.
Those doctors punched holes in the bottle and even cut the bottom off. At that point they saw that the girl’s tongue had swollen so big it had filled the entire circumference of the bottle, had turned blue, and had been cut up by the ridges on top of the container.
Still, nothing was working.
“After about eight hours they realized they were going to have to transfer her to surgery. Her heart rate was dropping, her blood pressure was dropping, her breathing was dropping,” Small said.
Because the girl's mouth was full, doctors put Jayla on a respirator to administer anesthesia.
“The doctor ended up having to yank and yank and pull to get it off,” Small said.
Her daughter stayed in the ICU for two days after the surgery.
Now, Small says her daughter is traumatized, but recovering.
She still has swelling in the back of her throat. She can eat no solid food — everything must be pureed — and has to use a host of antibiotics and antiseptics to avoid infection.

Jayla is too scared to even drink from a regular cup and may have to take speech therapy because of possible nerve damage from the incident, a local Fox affiliate reported.
“I would tell parents not to even give bottles like that to their children,” Small said.
The mother is considering pursuing legal action against the company that made the bottle, but because it was a gift from a fair, she is struggling to find the name of the manufacturer. She says she hopes to contact the manufacturer “even if it's nothing but to tell them that they need to be recalled.”

Her tongue after the operation