Glass found in coffee lands Sydney woman in hospital
A Sydney woman has been hospitalised after glass swallowing glass that she believes was in the ice served with her takeaway coffee.
The woman, identified only as Natalie, bought the coffee at the Brewtown Newtown on Newtown’s O’Connell St one Sunday morning earlier this month.
“I realised something was wrong as soon as I started swallowing the mouthful of ice,” Natalie, 39, told news.com.au. “It felt hard and sharp, and just not right.”
She said she figured out it was glass when she spat it out and rolled it in her fingers.
“One of the pieces wasn’t melting. Instead it cut my finger, which was when I realised it was glass,” he told the news organisation.
So Natalie, who works at news.com.au, cleaned her cut and then googled ““what happened when you swallow glass”.
Google told her that glass could pass through the digestive system without any internal damage.
But by 10.30 the next morning, she felt that advice was wrong.
She felt faint and light-headed. And when she went to the toilet, she noticed that she had passed blood.
As a result, her colleagues called an ambulance.
Natalie was transported to the Prince of Wales at Randwick, the nearest surgical hospital.
“The ambulance officer told me I might need surgery and that freaked me out. I could be about to be cut open, just because I drank a coffee,” she told news.com.au.
She was put through two days of tests and procedures with pain and discomfort. In the end, she was discharged without needing to go through surgery.
The medical reports indicated however she had suffered “rectal bleeding after ingesting ice/glass”.
Natalie said she notified Brewtown Newtown of the incident. She also reported it to the Food Safety Authority and the local council.
News.com.au cited email correspondence between Natalie and the venue where Brewtown representative blamed it on the cafe’s ice supplier.
The venue asked Natalie hand over the piece of glass “for analysis” along with a complete log of everything she ate in the 36 hours leading up to purchasing the coffee but did not identify the ice supplier or indicate how it was stored or what action it had taken to ensure other customers would not be affected.
by Leon Gettler, December 20th 2017
