Toddler who ate teddy bear eye on the mend

More than a year after Hailey Wudwud swallowed a teddy bear eye, the Regina toddler has now come through major surgery and is making a speedy recovery.

“It’s turning out better than I expected. I expected months of recovery and it just seems to be going so fast,” said Cyndi Gabora, Wudwud’s grandmother. She noted even the doctors seemed impressed with the two-year-old’s quick progress.

Wudwud’s parents first noticed she was having trouble breathing last July. Months of appointments with doctors and specialists followed. In February, she saw another specialist in Saskatoon who called for a bronchoscopy — a procedure that would show the inside of Wudwud’s air passages — to be done the next day. The bronchoscopy revealed a plastic eye from a teddy bear stuck in the lower part of her esophagus.

Because the eyeball had been lodged in her esophagus for so long, her tissue had grown around it. The immediate surgery to remove the object left a hole in the airway.

Wudwud underwent a 12-hour surgery Thursday at the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, where surgeons used part of her stomach to replace the torn part of her esophagus.

Waiting for an update while Wudwud was in surgery was nerve-racking for Gabora, but doctors said the surgery went well and, after being kept under anesthesia for a day afterward, Wudwud was happy and asking for her favourite song to be played.

“The first time she woke up she was asking for Baby Shark, putting her two fingers together the way she does, so (we) knew then that she was going to be OK,” Gabora said with a laugh. “She started sitting up (and) playing.”

Gabora is hopeful Wudwud will soon be able to eat liquid food again.

“Once she can actually take something down and actually swallow again, that would be the best we can hope for right now,” Gabora said. She said Wudwud will likely be released from the hospital in the next week or two, although she will still need to go back for frequent updates afterward.

With severe scar tissue left on one lung and a tiny hole left in her stomach, Gabora said the twoyear-old will likely need to be on asthma and stomach medication for the rest of her life. But she believes that is a small price to pay after what her granddaughter has gone through.

To help the family cover the cost of frequent trips to Saskatoon, Gabora started a Gofundme page.