A mother from the United Kingdom was just left horrified after her 6 year-old daughter choked on a face mask that had been baked into her Chicken McNuggets at a McDonald’s restaurant.

“I thought, ‘What on earth is this?’ ” Laura Arber, 32, wrote in a Facebook post that has since been deleted. “We have just come out of a pandemic and there is a face mask in my child’s chicken nugget!”

Hampshire Live reported that Arber had taken her three children to McDonald’s for dinner at around 6pm on Tuesday night. They then returned home to enjoy their meal, and all seemed to be going well until Arber’s daughter Maddie started choking on the couch.

“I put my fingers down her throat to loop it out of there — and she was just blue with the sick,” Arber recounted. She added that she quickly found fragments of the disposable face mask in two of the 20 fried chicken pieces, with them being “cooked into it, like a part of the mixture.”

Things only got worse when Arber confronted the managers of the restaurant about what had happened, explaining that they refused to apologize and even kept serving the chicken nuggets.

“I just couldn’t believe the way the management were handling it,” she said, adding that she previously had more respect for McDonald’s, as she once stayed at a Ronald McDonald House while her son was in intensive care.

However, McDonald’s has since released a statement to Daily Mail saying that the incident was actually handled well by employees.

“We are very sorry to hear about this customer’s experience,” a spokesman for the restaurant chain said. “Food safety is of the utmost importance to us and we place great emphasis on quality control, following rigorous standards to avoid any imperfections.

“When the matter was brought to the attention of our staff, we apologized, offered a full refund and asked the customer to return the item so we could further investigate the matter and isolate the affected product,” the spokesman added.

Despite this, Arber is still shaken by what happened.

“What if I had walked out of the room and my daughter had choked? She could have died. It’s a split second thing,” she said. “And I am just thinking, we have just come out of a pandemic and there is a face mask in my child’s chicken nugget.”