The Lost Buckyballs

A 15-year-old female with no past medical history presented 3 hours after ingesting 2 Buckyballs she had been using to create a mock tongue piercing. Buckyballs are 5-mm magnets made of neodymium, which is 5 times more powerful than a regular magnet. They are used as educational toys and as an artistic medium. Buckyball stopped production in 2012 after many cases of ingestion and a United States Consumer Product Safety Commission lawsuit.1 On exam, her abdomen was soft, nontender, and nondistended. An abdominal x-ray showed 2 radiopaque objects in the mid-abdomen (Figure 1). Colonoscopy revealed a normal colon and terminal ileum without visualization of the Buckyballs. During a retrograde double balloon enteroscopy, the enteroscope was advanced over 150 cm into the small bowel without visualization of the Buckyballs. Fluoroscopy confirmed that the Buckyballs had migrated to the right lower quadrant. The enteroscope was reduced under fluoroscopy until the tip of the scope was at the site of the Buckyballs in the cecum; however, the Buckyballs still could not be located (Figure 2).