HALIFAX – A Fall River family is speaking out after their son encountered a hazard while swimming that they never dreamed possible.
On Saturday, 5-year-old Ronan Sinclair was swimming with his younger brother and older sister at their grandmother’s pool in Fall River. The three kids swam for several hours that afternoon and were changing out of their bathing suits later that day when their aunt, Debbie Snow, heard a terrifying sound. “I heard Ronan screaming. ‘Auntie Debbie, my pee pee is stuck,’” she said.
It turns out that, while Ronan was swimming, his foreskin had somehow gotten caught in the mesh lining of his swimming trunks. “I could see part of his penis was through the little tiny hole [of the mesh]. It was swollen. It was about the size of a small baby pea. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, what do I do?’”
Snow frantically called Ronan’s mother and father, who were having a date night, and the pair rushed to the house. “The small hole of the mesh in the bathing suit had basically snagged his skin, his foreskin, and that snagged skin had swelled. We couldn’t get it off him at that point,” said mother Michelle Hilchie-Sinclair. “I never imagined anything like that could possibly happen.”
Hilchie-Sinclair describes Ronan as hysterical, crying and in intense pain. “I was able to calm him down enough to be able to cut around the mesh, to be able to have just that piece of mesh stuck to him,” she said.
The family rushed Ronan to the emergency room at the IWK, where doctors were able to carefully and delicately cut the five-year-old loose.