Child Paralyzed After Eating An Almond
This is one of those stories that reminds parents to always be very careful about their little boy or girl.
David, a boy of only two years, is in a precarious state of health and can no longer move his body due to an accident that took place 7 months ago after eating an almond.
José Domingo Cruz and Amparo Alba, the little one’s parents, wanted to share this story with everyone so that something like a child never happens again.
Their statements were made public by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo , which made a commitment to divulge their experience to warn other people and to allow the two unfortunate parents to find help.
The story of the child …
Almond
The feast of the Virgen del Remedio , the patron saint of Petrés, a village in the Valencian community (Spain) where this family resides , was being celebrated in the house of the Cruz Alba family. There was baked meat and many other delicacies that guests would enjoy later.
In one of those moments of confusion that often arise on these occasions, little David took an almond from the plate of appetizers.
The child put it in his mouth and, as he used to do, sat on the sofa to watch cartoons while the adults were busy preparing lunch. He coughed a couple of times, but no one paid much attention to this, because the baby didn’t seem to be in any danger.
The child and the fever
What would become this family’s worst nightmare unfolded a week later. David’s fever reached 40 ºC.
His parents immediately took him to the pediatrician at the hospital in the municipality of Elda, almost 182 km away, and he told him that perhaps the fever was due to the fact that the child was having teeth.
The drugs prescribed did not bring down the fever. Days later, on October 18, he was transferred to the emergency room on suspicion of pneumonia.
However, a few days later, the doctors decided to discharge the baby because they did not notice anything abnormal. But David’s health continued to deteriorate and his parents were receiving more and more evasive responses from doctors.
One day, trying to find an explanation for the child’s precarious health, the parents suddenly remembered the episode of the almond and cough that hit David soon after and began to suspect that it could be somehow connected to his current condition.
The baby’s operation
After being informed of the incident, on 11 January the doctors sent the baby to the hospital in Alicante, where he was kept under observation for 4 days and then underwent a bronchoscopy.
David was introduced with a flexible tube through the larynx to identify and then extract the piece of almond which had apparently been in the lung for 3 months.
The real problem, however, was caused by the tube itself that caused the pus that had accumulated in the lung to extend, causing cardiac arrest.
The doctors took about 28 minutes to resuscitate the baby and had to put him into a coma to try to stabilize his condition.
12 days after this complication, David woke up with no more infected lung, but with severe neurological damage due to cardiac arrest.
He can open his eyes, but he can’t see. His body is immobile, he cannot eat or speak.
For the parents of the child, the state of health of the child is due to the serious negligence of the doctors who did not carry out preliminary tests to understand to what extent it could be convenient to extract the piece of almond.
“His lung was rotten and the almond was a plug to the infection. If they had understood it from the beginning, all this would not have happened ”- José Domingo assures indignantly.
The risks of suffocation
Pediatricians recommend that children under 5 never eat dried fruit, because there is a high risk of asphyxiation.
They also claim that around 80% of child suffocation cases have to do with these foods.
Amparo and José Domingo do not believe that this is a simple accident and are demanding justice. In the meantime, many people have decided to support them and in just two weeks they have already collected 10,000 euros necessary for the treatments of little David.
* Anyone wishing to contribute by making a donation to the family can make a transfer to the following current account: ES60 0182 0134 2702 0154 0008.
