A Penny for Your...

I’m glad I get to tell this story. I knew it would be a funny story if it ended well, but until it was over, the humor was overshadowed by concern.

One Sunday evening I was relaxing in a lawn chair umpiring an intense game of backyard wiffle ball when the 4-year-old walked over to me and conspiratorially whispered, “Dad, I think I swallowed a penny at church.”

As appeals to the umpire rained down around me unheeded, I asked the 4-year-old some questions and watched him carefully. The story being related was ridiculous.  “A kid threw a penny in the air…and my mouth was open…and it landed in my mouth…and I think I swallowed it.”

But as umpire dad shifted into detective dad I saw enough pieces of credible details to believe the story as a whole was true. When he stated that the penny had been found by his 9-year-old  brother who had given it to him I knew there was some verifiable information to investigate.

I checked my timeline and quickly determined if he had ingested a penny, it had been approximately nine hours ago. On the one hand this was good news as he had exhibited no signs of having any issue throughout the day and he certainly was not choking on it.

On the other hand, we were potentially nine hours into a situation I had limited information about handling.

As much as I didn’t want to, I Googled it. According to Google’s AI search engine, 80,000 kids in the US swallow a non-food item each year, with the most common object being a coin, and the most common coin being a penny. The good news about that was that fewer than 1 out of 10 kids who swallow a coin need to be hospitalized to remove it.

The vast majority of the time, the coin takes the same path as all the other food items your kid eats. As further reassurance, this is also the case with other small non-food objects like tacks. Yes, tacks!

So, after consulting with a doctor, and since he had no other symptoms, Plan A was to simply let nature take its course and wait. Most coins hit the, er, coin return within 4-5 days, and often in the first 48 hours so it would be a while.

I used the next few minutes to interview the 9-year-old, aka, the accused supplier of the penny. His instant denial of having given the 4-year-old the penny was a) expected and b) necessitated further investigation.

This spiraled into a multi-stage interrogation of three other brothers where a plausible story was developed. Because, in a family this big, there’s always a witness. Well, almost. While I was able to establish a penny was found and confirmed the 4-year-old had it at church, no one witnessed the actual alleged swallowing event.

During my internet research, I had noted the two biggest concerns about swallowed pennies are them getting caught in the throat or staying in the stomach. Because pennies minted after 1981 are 97% zinc there’s a concern they can lead to zinc poisoning if stuck in the stomach.

As I pondered how, aside from a lack of symptoms, to know the alleged penny was not in his stomach, I also wondered aloud what year the penny was. To which the 11-year-old responded, “it was at least a 2012.” I asked him how he knew this and he said he had seen the penny when the 9-year-old first found it and it had a shield on the back which they only started doing in 2012 (well, that’s what he said out loud but inside he definitely said, “elementary my dear Watson”).

I looked this up and it turned out that it was 2010 instead of 2012 when they started using the shield but either way him seeing a shield on the back meant it was a newer penny. So, if the 4-year-old had swallowed that penny, it was one of the super zinc-y ones. Great.

By this time, being almost 12 hours past ingestion, with no other symptoms, and medical guidance that a wait and see approach was reasonable we put the 4-year-old to bed.

I conferred with my wife on the plan and she volunteered to be the crime scene investigator checking for evidence -- if you know what I mean. I was convinced the penny had been swallowed but was also bothered by not knowing for sure and mulled over a way, aside from an X-ray, to determine this.

And then inspiration struck.

I got the 11-year-old (he of the odd coin knowledge) and asked him to get his metal detector. After some trial and error we determined, with the proper calibration, it could detect a penny held behind my back through my body. I then confiscated the metal detector for official business.

The next morning, I interrupted the 4-year-old on his regularly scheduled trip to the commode. Being careful not to make a game out of this that might somehow encourage penny ingestion, I explained I needed to scan him and proceeded to scan him like he was about to board an airplane. And down in his large intestine – beep! – the detector cried penny.

Well, it cried metal. Unfortunately, I still didn’t know that this was a penny, or just one penny. But I did know it was not in his stomach so that was good.

However, I had interrupted his routine to pull him out of line to do this little scan so now he didn’t want to go potty. And that went on for a while. I had really wanted to check him prior to going, to get a baseline reading, but was now worried this may have messed with the natural progress of things.

He went back on routine however, and we got into a rhythm of Mom being the CSI technician and Dad being the TSA agent. When the metal detector was still beeping after 3 days the tension started to build. Then the kid decided to go on poop strike for a day and that increased the tension even more.

But I told you this story had a happy ending. On day five after he went I scanned him and there was no beeping. And sure enough, Mom discovered the culprit. A 2014 penny.

They say it costs more than one cent to mint a penny. Which means pennies are worth less than they cost. But I’ll tell you this -- that refunded penny was worth a lot more than one cent to me.