Swallowed A Penny

I was a young child, perhaps 6 or 7 years old, as I lay on my bed, lost in a daydream as I rolled a penny around in my mouth with my tongue. My tongue lost control of the penny, and I swallowed it. I was brought back from my daydreaming with a panic, and I shot straight up and ran to my mother. I said, “Mom, I should have listened to you when you said don’t put things in your mouth! I just swallowed a penny!”

At that age, I didn’t know anything about chemistry (I suppose the same could be said of me at this age as well), but I had a feeling that having swallowed a penny could be very bad. In most cases, swallowing a penny is, in fact, no big deal, as it will pass through the digestive tract in a couple of days. In some cases, however, the newer pennies (those made since 1982), can cause ulcers, because while the older pennies were made of copper, the newer pennies are only coated with copper, being made of zinc. And the zinc can interact with the digestive acids to form ulcer-inducing chemicals.

My reason for fearing that having swallowed a penny could dangerous, however, probably had — in my child’s mind — more to do with a myth that a lot of children believe to be true; my childhood friends and I thought that swallowed gum takes seven years to digest. I remember one of my friends telling me that a girl he knew had swallowed gum so frequently that it clogged up her stomach to the point where she had to have surgery to have the gum removed. Gum is actually made of a fibrous material that will pass right through the GI tract, but it made sense at the time.

So, if swallowing gum were that dangerous, then surely swallowing a penny could be just as bad or worse!