A recent patient of mine was a 14 year old boy not breathing after choking on....a hot dog. Parents said he has always had a problem with eating his food too fast. They had told him that day to slow down on his hot dogs. He got tired of listening to it, so he took his food to his room. They went to check on him later on...and he was on the floor blue and apneic.He was intubated at arrival to the ER. Poor kid ended up needing a bronchoscopy to remove the rest of the hot dog, and his lungs suffered from florid pulmonary edema. Thankfully in the end he recovered and didn't have any neurovascular deficits....which shocked me.
For all the young ones out there....moral of the story is to chew your food. Or as my 7 year said when I told her about this..."you should always listen to your parents."
-ER Doc
8 comments:
apparently hotdogs are bad for all ages lol
That is just plain scary. My 17 year old loves to eat hotdogs...while on the computer...i must remind him to chew his food...i'm sure he'll looooove that!
Thanks for the reminder!
He does bring his plate down when he's finished...so i'll know he's alive...?! ;)
The first pediatric call I ever worked was a 2 year old with a chunk of hotdog stuck in his trachea, completely blocking his airway.
We used a laryngoscope and some McGill forceps to fish it out. I was worried about hypoxic brain damage because he was apneic for 6 plus minutes when I had him, but from what I've heard since then has made a complete recovery - the only long term effect he has is an intense dislike for hotdogs.
I don't blame him!
A bit of a tangent, but this reminds me of when my (ex)father-in-law tried to feed my (then) 18-month-old daughter a LifeSaver. "It's got a hole in the middle, she won't suffocate!" Mind you, he knew this from first-hand experience, when his own son choked on a LifeSaver as a young boy and that little hole was the only thing that kept him alive & breathing.
Why he thought that meant it was a great candy for my toddler is beyond me...
how can you intubate someone with an obstructed airway?
Anonymous...your correct you technically can't intubate if obstructed. First try to remove obstruction with heimlech maneuver as done in this case. If that doesn't work, try foreceps while you have a good view while you have the blade in the mouth. If those aren't working, you can do an emergent crich if the obstruction is high enough. If low and you are loosing brain tissue from hypoxia, I would contemplate using a bougie to move the obstruction distally (causing an aspiration and a date with a bronchoscopy)to save the patient. I don't know if that's textbook though
but you said he came in intubated, how is that possible if he was actively choking and ended up with a bronch?
Ah god, once I had some kid like that who had eaten a hot dog, and then been unable to swallow for like 3 days.
In the ER after several hours, he made this huge choking noise, and an entire white, three-day-old hot dog that had been resting in his esophagus popped out.
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