Woman claims she swallowed AirPod, mistaking it for painkiller

Carli Bellmer says AirPod also audibly transmitted a voice note from inside her stomach as it was still connected to her iPhone

A 27-year-old woman mistook her Airpod for ibuprofen and ate it. Screengrab (TikTok/@iamcarliiib)

A 27-year-old TikToker has shot to fame after she revealed in a series of posts that she swallowed her Apple AirPod, mistaking it for ibuprofen.

Carli Bellmer, who goes by the handle @IamCarliiib, told her followers that she ultimately passed the AirPod, saying that this was confirmed by an X-ray. But before the earphone left her body, Ms Bellmer says she sent her friend a voice memo that the AirPod, freakishly, audibly transmitted from inside her stomach.

She told her 3,200 followers: “So like, I ate my f***ing left AirPod. I was crawling into bed and I had an ibuprofen 800 in one hand and my f***ing AirPod — my left earbud — in the other.”

The podcaster from Boston said that she mindlessly popped in what she thought was the pill and swallowed it with water. “I then realised that it wasn’t the ibuprofen,” she said. “I tired puking it and it won’t come out, and I’m f***ing losing my mind.”

The video has so far garnered more than 2.4 million views on TikTok.

She explained that she wanted to share her experience with others as she wasn’t the first to do this and is unlikely to be the last. “So for educational purposes, I wanted to share my journey of how this is all going,” she said.

While many sympathised with Ms Bellmer, her claim was also met with scepticism.

One user on TikTok asked: “How do you mix up ibuprofen and an AirPod?” Another accused her of trying to gain fame on the platform by making such mind-boggling claims. “Sound like c*** to me,” they said.

Others jumped in to defend her. One TikTok user wrote: “In her defence, Ibuprofen 800 are huge so they do sorta resemble an AirPod if you’re distracted.”

In her follow-up posts, Ms Bellmer added that she had sent her friend a voice memo that the AirPod audibly transmitted from inside her belly. The AirPod was still connected to her iPhone. “It’s comical now, but very scary at the time,” she said of the ordeal.

The TikToker also assured her followers that an X-ray examination showed that the AirPod was no longer in her stomach. “An X-ray showed that I passed it. I had a feeling that I passed it. I did not retrieve it, but I know that it’s passed. I know that it was in my stomach and no longer is,” she said.

This is not the first time a person has swallowed their AirPods by mistake.

In February this year, a man from Massachusetts said that he swallowed his AirPod in his sleep and woke up struggling to breathe. Doctors performed an emergency endoscopy, using a long, thin tube to remove it from his oesophagus, leaving Brad Gauthier no worse for wear, but the microphone in the pod broken.

Last year in January, a seven-year-old boy from Georgia in the US was rushed to the emergency room after he swallowed an AirPod that he was holding in his mouth. He had to wait to let it pass, after it made it into his stomach.

And in 2019, a man in Taiwan had a similar accident, though his AirPod still miraculously worked after making its reappearance.