Freak shoelace accident injures young girl's kidney

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- A freak accident involving an untied shoelace sent a little Belmont,Calif., girl to the hospital with a serious injury. It was a lunchtime accident February 27 that sent 7-year-old Sophia to Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford for nearly a week.

"I tripped on my shoelace, and fell on the curve, and I hit my side on it," said Sophia Angelini.

She went to the school nurse's office because of the pain, and because she had thrown up, her parents were called to take her home. They thought it was probably something minor, but the vomiting continued. And so did the trips for care. First to an urgent care center, then a trip to an emergency room before taken to Stanford.

"When we saw the CT scan, we were pretty floored. We didn't even know that was possible, that you could break a piece of your kidney off," Sophia's mother, Sara Angelini, said.

But it happened to Sophia, and something needed to be done to save her kidney. Doctor Hsi-Yang Wu performed the endoscopic surgery.

"We put a little plastic stent, a tube between the kidney and the bladder. The purpose is to let the urine go from the kidney out into the bladder, rather than sitting around the kidney," Dr. Wu said.

So how do you explain all of this to a 7-year-old girl?

"We drew her a picture of a happy kidney on one side, with a smiley face, and a sad kidney on the other. We told her, this is the kidney that got hurt, but he's going to get better in a couple weeks, and his sad face will turn happy," Sophia's father Dominic Angelini said.

Sophia will be out of school for the next two weeks, but doctors have already given her some homework.

"We're supposed to walk three times a day, it's very tricky because there's lots of pressure," Sophia said.

Although she's tired, it's an assignment she says she's happy to do.

Long-term, her kidney has lost about 25% of its functionality, which Dr. Wu says won't have major impact.