Caleb Swallowing a Penny

Right before we left to Church on Sunday, September 2, 2007, Caleb rushed into my room and had a panic look on his face. He said that something was stuck in his throat.

I looked at him briefly and said, “Well, then spit it out.”

He was more persistent and said, “No, Mom, I think I have a penny stuck in my throat!”

I looked at him in bewilderment. How could my 7 year-old child have a penny stuck in his throat? That is something that I worry about with my 2 year-old, but not my older boys! But I could tell that he was being serious and looking very worried.

“Why do you think that you have a penny in your throat?” I asked.

“Because I put one in my mouth and swallowed it.” He answered with such simple logic.

I knew that he wasn’t in immediate danger because he could still talk and breathe, but now he was starting to panic.

So I tried hitting him hard on the back trying to loosen it. Didn’t work. I tried sticking my finger down his throat to try to grab it out. Didn’t work. Caleb tried spitting it out. Didn’t work. Ben tried the heimlich maneuver. Didn’t work. Nothing we tried would work! So we decided to take him to Urgent Care. To make a long story short, the Urgent Care was closed so Ben brought him back home and finally convinced Caleb to get a drink. (This is something that we couldn’t get him to do before. And Ben knew that Urgent Care couldn’t do anything that we couldn’t do ourselves at this point. So I think that Ben was relieved.) Finally after about one hour of going through this whole ordeal, he swallowed the penny with a simple drink of water!

Caleb told us after it was all over and after we assured him it would be OK if he swallowed the penny, that he thought he would die if he swallowed it. Poor kid! The whole time of panic and pain he endured would have been shortened if we just knew his concerns so that we could have addressed them. I guess that is how life really is, sometimes people just struggle everyday to get by and we try to help, but we don’t know what their concerns really are and what is bothering them. But once we find out and gain some insight into what they are going through, help is easier to come by.

After everything was said and done, I asked Caleb what he learned from the whole “penny experience”. He said that he learned to “never look at coins or pennys, never go by them and never to touch them.”

I looked at him and tried not to laugh and said, "Well, what about putting them in your mouth?"

"Oh yeah...and don't put them in your mouth."