To the ER!

This happened a few weeks ago and Jonathan insisted it deserved a post.

The day after Easter I kept finding bits of wrappers, scotch tape, assorted flotsam on the floor- just perfect for Corinna to practice her finger grasp and eat.  Even though I swept the floor several times she still found things to shove into her mouth and so I fished bits of this 'n that out from between her clenched teeth (and was bitten for my efforts too!).

That afternoon, I was on the couch when I heard Corinna making a gagging sound by the toy basket.  Here it goes again!  I scooped her up, tilted her head down and forward and swept her mouth with my finger expecting to make contact with a forgotten wrapper.  Nothing.  Thinking perhaps Corinna was just making noise I set her loose.  Perhaps a minute past and she started gagging and coughing again.  My investigations still yielded nothing.  I turned her loose again and then she gagged and threw up.  Hmm. She didn't expel anything obvious.  I got a flashlight and peered into her mouth and still couldn't see anything.

After throwing up she wanted to nurse and so I obliged her thinking perhaps that if there was anything in her throat that perhaps it would be dislodged down to her stomach by swallowing.  She suckled briefly and then vomited some more.  At this point I started to get alarmed.  While she didn't seem to have any difficulty breathing, she did start drooling and it seemed likely that she had something caught in her throat. She continued to gag off and on.

I called Andrea and asked her to come by to watch the big kids while I took Corinna to the emergency department.  Andrea arrived and Corinna and I left.  When we got there, they hooked her up to check her oxygen levels.  Fortunately her oxygen saturation was perfectly normal.  The doctor still wanted to do an x-ray since it was still very possible to have something lodged in her throat with normal oxygen levels.  He did caution that if it was plastic it might not show up on x-ray, but that there might be swelling in one of her lungs and that would be apparent on film.  So we waited for a tech to free up and do an x-ray.

Throughout our wait in the little room Corinna was much more subdued than average.  She just wanted to snuggle on my lap.  She didn't want to crawl around and cause mayhem which is highly unusual for her.  However the oxygen monitor wrapped on her big toe really annoyed her and whenever she could, she ripped it off and tossed.

The techs stripped Corinna down to her diaper and did a chest x-ray.  To do this they set her in a clever contraption.  She was placed in a bicycle like seat and two long clear plastic shields tied together held her in place with her arms above her head.  Corinna howled in protest to the indignity,  but the whole process took less than a minute.

Then we waited some more.

The x-ray results didn't show anything, so the doctor wanted her to do a swallow test.  If she drank and kept things down then we could go home.  If not than the next step was exploratory surgery with a surgeon.  Eek!

They brought 6 oz of baby gatorade.  I coaxed an ounce down her before she refused any more.  She was hungry and wanted milk!  She hadn't eaten since her abortive attempt 4 hours ago and hadn't really had a meal since much earlier than that.  When we arrived she was to have nothing by mouth, so she was very eager to nurse.  So she did.

It stayed down!  Hooray!  We were discharged with instructions to call if anything changed and admonished to keep small things picked up.

It seems whatever was stuck in her throat resolved itself, and so we left for home.  Poorer and wiser.  When we got home, the big kids were still awake in their beds and very concerned about Corinna.  In fact they got very vigilant about picking up small things.  For a few days anyway.