“You swallowed a what?”
Illinois mom Julie Van Rossum thought her four-year-old, Ellie, was old enough to know better than to put something small in her mouth. Ellie sat in front of her toy cash register, looking mortified.
“A penny, Mommy!”
Ellie wasn’t choking, and didn’t look sick. “Did you really swallow it?” Julie asked. “Why would you do that?”
“I didn’t mean to!” Ellie said. “It just went down!” Now Julie was concerned. Her daughter didn’t seem to be in pain, but Julie dialed her pediatrician, who advised her to keep an eye out to make sure the penny made its “natural exit.” Ellie would be fine. But the coin didn’t appear, that day or the next. Julie and her husband brought Ellie in for X-rays.
The doctor held the scans up to the light. He frowned, circled something fuzzy, not quite in Ellie’s stomach, but farther up.
“Is that the penny?” Julie asked.
No, the doctor said. He believed it was something else. A CT scan confirmed his fears. A tumor was growing on Ellie’s spine. She would need a biopsy. Even if the tumor was benign, it posed a risk of causing paralysis, or worse. It had to come out. The penny was quickly forgotten.
The surgeon emerged from Ellie’s biopsy to deliver his findings. If the tumor had grown any larger, it would have wrapped itself around the spinal cord and pressed against Ellie’s heart, making it dangerous, maybe even impossible, to remove. “We caught it just in time,” the surgeon said. “I can remove it right now.”
After a four-hour surgery and five days in the hospital, Ellie was able to go home. The biopsy later came back positive for ganglioneuroblastoma. A rare, difficult to detect, aggressive cancer. But they’d gotten it all. No chemotherapy, no more surgeries necessary.
Five years later, Ellie’s scans showed no sign of cancer. And that penny? There was no sign of that either.
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