Colton Harwood was 10 months old when he was eating Teddy Grahams and Goldfish crackers while he sat on the sofa with his father in the family’s Virginia Beach home in July.
His mother, Brandy Harwood, noticed a strange look on his face like he was trying hard to swallow. Colton has 11 older brothers and sisters in his family, so his parents have plenty of experience in knowing when something is wrong with a kid.
Brandy and her husband, Robert, patted him on the back, thinking maybe he was choking on one of his snacks.
“I knew within a minute we had to go to the ER,” Brandy said.
On the way, his eyes became red and he turned blue for a moment. “I was in panic mode. Something was wrong, something more than a Teddy graham,” says Brandy.
An X-ray showed that he had a button battery lodged in his esophagus, so he was transferred by ambulance to CHKD.
What the Harwoods didn’t know at the time is that swallowed batteries can lodge in the esophagus and cause serious burn injuries in just a couple of hours.
In some situations, the batteries pass through the gut with no problems, but because button batteries have become so small, there’s been an increase in cases where children spend days in the hospital after suffering internal burns. Some children have needed to be on feeding tubes, and some have even died.
Dr. Craig Derkay, director of Pediatric Otolaryngology at CHKD, said the hospital has a set protocol for these situations. Once it’s confirmed the battery is lodged in the esophagus, time is of the essence.
Dr. Derkay lives only 10 minutes from the hospital, so he headed in, which is how the battery came to be removed two hours and 20 minutes after Colton put it in his mouth.
Already, there was an acid burn, but Dr. Derkay put in a soft feeding tube and Colton was taken to the pediatric intensive care unit. He spent five days in the hospital.
Soon he was back to his normal self.
His parents believe he must have gotten the battery between sofa cushions, but they have no idea how it got there. Brandy remembers throwing a weight scale away in the trash recently, so it might have come from that.
They did a meticulous search of their house to remove any other batteries, and found some in door and window alarms. Brandy’s been trying to get the word out to families with children, because she doesn’t want them to go through the same thing Colton did.
Written by Elizabeth Earley • Photographs courtesy of Colton's Mom Brandy Harwood
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