5-yr-old died after swallowing balloon
December 18, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Very sad and sobering news to hear in this holiday season: On March 17th, 5-year-old Lily Breen swallowed a balloon and was found unconscious by her parents in their home in Desborough, Northants. As reported in today’s Telegraph, the death of Lily, who was autistic, has been ruled an accident. Lily’s mother, Angela, a registered nurse, tried to resuscitate her daughter before rushing her to the hospital, where she died.
The inquest heard Lily was very tactile and liked to play with things, and had a high pain threshold, often touching hot radiators with her hand or tongue.
Mrs Breen said she had found Lily with the balloon earlier that day and had thought to dispose of it as it was a risk, but had not got round to doing it, and had not noticed it again that day.
In her statement, she said: “I didn’t see the balloon following this and thought nothing more about this. We have since thought about it, I really don’t know where she got it from.
“I am absolutely devastated by the loss of my little girl and I am trying to come to terms with it.”
She said her daughter was a “loving and active young girl” who was very energetic.
Will be thinking of Lily and her family in this season, and after.
anything I find in Alec’s mouth goes in the bin. Especially balloons as he likes to breathe in and out of them. Someone gave him a bag of marbles and it slipped by me and was opened, it has taken 9 months to find them all and dispose of them. Even at 7 it is the one thing that scares me the most
My son is the same–”high pain threshold” and it is so scary. He is 7 and I stopped him from putting a wire ornament hook in his mouth last week.
How very sad. My heart goes out to the family.
I’ve been looking back on the times when Charlie was younger and liked playing with an unblown-up balloon—and realizing how unsafe that was, good thing he only had them when someone was with him.
I’m sure that we can all look back at different things and realize that we were just lucky that they turned out well.
My kids used to play with the magnetized alphabet letters that you could put on the fridge- 2 of my kids were obsessed with the alphabet, and I can’t count how many hours they spent re-arranging letters. Knowing what we now know about kids swallowing magnets, that wasn’t the greatest idea on my part. My son had pica, yet it never occurred to me to lock the dish soap away- even though he’d already chugged back soy sauce, vinegar, and perfume. It just didn’t occur to me that dish soap could be viewed as a food item, even though I’d had ample evidence to the contrary.
And my all-time favourite embarrassing screw up on my part (which fortunately had no lasting repercussions)- we have video of my kids 2nd birthday party (they’re triplets). You see me in the kitchen putting out their awesomely decorated individual cupcakes on a plate, proudly taking them into the room while 40 people sing Happy Birthday to them, and then me giving them the cupcakes (with LIT candles on them), which promptly turned into one of them burning the other two while the two that were getting burned were trying to eat their OWN burning candles. There were at least 40 people in the room, and none of us clued in that maybe burning candles for autistic triplets wasn’t the brightest idea.
I console myself now with the fact that all of my kids have lived to be 13, and they’re all healthy. For 3 weeks I thought that my daughter had stomach flu because she was vomiting on and off- it turns out that it was actually the massive tumour in her stomach that was making her vomit, but there’s no way that I could have been expected to know that. Hindsight is always 20/20, and the fact is that all parents screw up sometimes, and we’re mainly lucky with outcomes.
I can’t tell you how many phone calls I’ve had from friends with kids (autistic and otherwise)…”we’re off to the ER because so and so stuck a skittle up his nose. We’re off to the the ER because someone ate my nail polish, toenail clippers, ate something, or climbed somewhere that they shouldn’t have.”
I think that’s what makes the story of poor Lily choking on a balloon so devastating for most of us- we’re all vigilant, but you can’t foresee everything, and you can’t be on guard 100% 24 hours a day. Most of the time we all get away with it, no matter how hard we try to keep our kids safe.
In that article, when Angela Breen says that “she had found Lily with the balloon earlier that day and had thought to dispose of it as it was a risk, but had not got round to doing it, and had not noticed it again that day.” …how many of us haven’t been there? You see something, you mean to do something about it, and you just don’t get around to it and forget about it quickly. I grieve with the Breen family for their loss, but I also hope that Mrs. Breen realizes that for whatever reason this happened, it wasn’t her fault. There isn’t a parent in the world who can foresee every single conquence every minute of the day.
What Jen said.
We’ve been there too…the seemingly innocent lemon drop sucked into the windpipe, requiring the Heimlich Manuever, the glass Christmas ornament that too closely resembled something to eat…
By the grace of God.
I am so sorry for the Breen family for the loss of Lily, and my condolences to them. There was a lot of love there, and this is a very sad thing.