Non-Ediable

--Daniel is mobile (crawling) and has been for about a month. He loves being mobile and being free to roam. He also likes to stop and pick up items off the floor and taste them. We are constantly jumping up and saying, "No, don't eat that.". We feel that we are quick with our response time and are very aware of what he is attempting to eat. We have "child proofed" the house as much as possible and we vacuum twice a day (morning and night) to prevent non-ediable food items from entering our child's mouth. It became apparent last night that we are not as quick and acurate as we think...
--The story actually began on Tuesday night (we think). We were all in the kitchen, Mommy and Daddy working on getting supper on the table and Daniel exploring. Mommy picked Daniel up to put him in his high chair and he coughed, gagged and spit up slimmy junk with what looked like a piece of lettuce. We discussed what had just happened and cleaned up the slimy mess off the floor. Our conclusion was that he had eaten a piece of lettuce that had fallen on the floor and it did not go down "easily". We fed him (attempted to feed him) supper. He would take a few bites and then spit the bites back ok with slimy junk. We decided that maybe his throat was irritated from the previous "incident" and we did not force him to eat. He had no other "issues" the rest of the night. He woke up Wednesday and we went about our day - diaper change, play, snack, nap, lunch, nap, snack, supper - and then our routine stopped. Daniel had spit up slimy stuff and uneaten food at every meal, supper being the worse and spots of blood was in the slimy stuff at supper. Mommy and Daddy guessed that what had happened Tuesday night (lettuce eating) had scratched Daniel's throat or maybe/possibly there was something stuck in his throat. We decided to head to the ER. Before going any farther we must fill you in on where we live and what our choices of medical treatment is...we live in a small town...we have a small ER (more like an emergency walk-in clinic)...we are 45 minutes from Nashville that is home to a lot of good ERs, especially Vanderbilt Children's...we are about 20 minutes from 2 fairly decent ERs in Clarksville (Gateway) and Springfield (Northcrest)...where to go? We haven't had too many ER visits with Daniel (considering his medical history) and the few we have had we have gone to Vanderbilt. We talked about it and decided to go to our small town ER. We had great hope that we were being overly paranoid parents and the doctor was going to look in Daniel's throat, do an x-ray and tell us he had a sore throat. Well, the doctor looked in Daniel's throat, did and x-ray and we were not being overly-paranoid parents. Since we were at a small ER we got to see the x-rays before the doctor and on the film we see a round spot that is the shape of a coin in our child's esphogas (sp?). We knew then it was going to be a LONG night. The ER we were in was not equipped to take care of this type of emergency. Daniel was transported to Vanderbilt via ambulance where we were greeted by a team of doctors that included GIs and surgeons. A repeat (better) x-ray was done and the doctors have guessed what is being seen on flim is a quarter that is stuck behind Daniel's esphogas. The treatment for this is to put the patient to sleep and do a scope to retrive the foreign object. Daniel was admitted to the hospital and the foreign object will be removed later today.
--If you made it through this long story, please keep Daniel in your prayers. This is a minor procedure but as with al procedures there is a risk of complications.