A young Central Coast family face a nervous wait after their three-year-old son stepped on a discarded needle at a popular local beach.

Beth Finlay, 33, had been carrying her toddler, Cashten, down the trail towards Umina Beach, NSW when she decided to let her barefoot son walk on his own.

She never expected to endure every parent’s worst nightmare.

“He just started saying ‘ouch, ouch’ but he wasn’t crying, I thought he had just stepped on a rock,” Mrs Finlay told Yahoo7 News.

“I didn’t expect to see a needle penduluming from one side to the other.

“It was lodged in his foot.”

Mrs Finlay said she tried to remain calm as the pulled the discarded needle that was lodged one centimetre deep in her son’s foot.

“I didn’t want to send him into a state of panic but when I brushed the sand off it and he could see the blood, he started to panic a bit,” she added.

Cashten has since undergone blood tests and while the initial results for Hepatitis B, Hepatits C and HIV came back negative, they will have to wait nine months to know he is completely in the clear.

“It (HIV) can take a while to show up, so we have to go back and do the six month and nine month tests,” Mrs Finlay added.

We hope he is OK! Not a very nice thing to happen to anyone.

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