Oh, what a delightful surprise! It turns out that swallowing a button battery (BB) is not just a bad idea for your digestive tract, but it’s also a fabulous way to play roulette with your vocal cords. Who would’ve thought, right? In a groundbreaking display of scientific curiosity, researchers decided to see just how a shiny CR2032 BB could serenade the recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) in a fresh pig esophagus.

In this thrilling experiment, they placed the BB with the negative electrode doing a tango with the nerve, while the positive electrode got the wallflower treatment in the control group. And because science loves numbers, they measured the pH values like it was the hottest trend. Lo and behold, the pH near the negative electrode skyrocketed to a skin-crawling 11.5 in just 30 minutes and then decided to break the charts at over 14 in 6 hours. Meanwhile, the extraesophageal pH played it cool until 2 hours in, then decided to join the party, hitting a solid 10 at the 6-hour mark.

But wait, there’s more! After 6 hours of this electrifying encounter, the esophagus and nerves looked like they’d been through a horror movie—mucosa, submucosa, and muscle layer in shambles, chromatin in the nucleus throwing in the towel, and part of the nerve bundle turning into a gooey mess.

So, in a shocking twist (pun intended), it seems that the OH^– ions from our little battery friend’s negative electrode are quite the vandals, penetrating the esophageal wall and having a corrosive heart-to-heart with the RLN. And there you have it, folks—the secret sauce behind vocal cord paralysis from BB ingestion, sans esophageal perforation. Science, isn’t it just the gift that keeps on giving?