The latest TikTok trend has sent a teenage girl to the hospital, where she then required emergency surgery.
Faye Elizabeth is warning other parents of this dangerous TikTok trend, which involves using magnetic balls on the skin in order to replicate the look of piercings.
Elizabeth’s daughter, whose name she has not released, was attempting to get the look of a tongue piercing — which involved placing metal balls on either side of her tongue.
The daughter later began vomiting and complaining of stomach pains.
“The pains got worse so I took her to Whiston Hospital. They thought it might have been her appendix at first,” Elizabeth told the Liverpool Echo. “Then they ruled that out and thought it might have been gastroenteritis until she started vomiting black stuff. They did a scan and found 10 of the ball bearings.”
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Elizabeth’s 13-year-old daughter swallowed the magnetic balls, according to the report, which eventually lodged themselves in her appendix and bowel.
“They had to take part of her bowel away and re-stitch it. There was one stuck in her appendix so they had to remove that,” Elizabeth shared with Liverpool Echo. The doctors reportedly removed 15 magnetic balls from the teen’s internal organs.
“Apparently she watched a TikTok video where there’s a trend that all the kids are doing at the minute. I haven’t actually seen it but she told me about it and a lot of other children her age have seen it,” the mom revealed. “They put one of the beads on top of their tongue and one underneath and it makes it look like their tongue is pierced.”
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As the magnets kids are so small, they are easy to swallow — especially in the case of Elizabeth’s daughter, they are applied orally.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) warns that rare-earth magnets can cause serious injury or death if swallowed.
When more than one is swallowed, “they can attract each other through walls of the intestines and cause severe injuries.” Symptoms of magnet ingestion include the following: fever, vomiting, and abdominal pain.