2-year-old almost died after popcorn infected his lung
Go ahead and splurge for the extra-large popcorn at your next family movie — but you might want to keep it away from the kids.
That’s what Nicole Johnson Goddard learned after letting her son Nash, 2, snack on the crunchy kernels during a Saturday night viewing of “Mrs. Doubtfire.” His older sisters — ages 7 and 9 — were eating it, and she couldn’t see the harm in letting him have some, too.
But as the flight attendant from Parker, Colo., wrote in a now viral post on Facebook, that decision had near-fatal consequences for her son, resulting in a four-day stay in the hospital.
“At first [Nash] choked on something,” Goddard, 39, tells The Post. “We heard him gasping for air so my husband picked him up to see if he could dislodge it.” Her husband put Nash down (and took away the snack), when the tot said he was fine.
That mid-February night, however, Nash developed “this really funky cough,” Goddard says, which turned into a 104-degree fever a few days later.
With a flu-like virus going around the house, Goddard says she took Nash to the pediatrician, even though she “had been in there with my girls on three separate occasions with them being sick.”
“I kind of felt like a hypochondriac,” she says.
It was her “mom instinct” that convinced her to bring him in anyway, and to mention the weekend’s choking incident to the doctor.
After X-rays and a visit to a pediatric pulmonologist, it was clear that Nash’s left lung was swollen and infected with pneumonia.
The culprit? Multiple microscopic pieces of popcorn that were still lodged in his respiratory tract.
“When he choked on it, he had a mouthful of popcorn that he had chewed up and he aspirated it,” Goddard says. It took two separate procedures, under general anesthesia, to “pick out the six pieces of popcorn: kernels, shells and everything else,” she says.
Now, with Nash healthy and out of the hospital, Goddard wants other parents to know the risks of letting their toddlers eat the movie-theater favorite. (As she learned, the American Academy of Pediatrics classifies popcorn, along with grapes and hot dogs, as a “high-risk food” for toddlers.)
“Honestly, I’m not a big Facebook sharer,” she says of writing up her story, which has been shared over 130,000 times, “but I thought, I might as well post it, because it’s alarming and I would have liked someone to do the same. Maybe it would have prevented this whole thing in the first place.”
via: https://nypost.com/2019/03/06/my-2-year-old-almost-died-after-popcorn-infected-his-lung/