Universal Sign for Choking

Teach your children the universal sign for choking. It never dawned on me that someone would have to be taught the sign for choking — I just always assumed someone choking made that sign naturally/instinctively.

I was upstairs eating some lunch alone in my quiet and peaceful bedroom, (don’t tell Wifegrit), when I heard Calfgrit9 downstairs sort of cry out. It was a weird cry. The boys had been in and out of the house a bit all morning, and I figured Calfgrit13 had done something to upset his little brother. They can’t seem to go half an hour without one aggravating the other. I put down my plate and made my way downstairs chewing a mouthful of food. I wasn’t hurrying because I didn’t hear any other cries or shouts from anyone.

Once I reached the bottom of the stairs, Calfgrit9 was there on his knees, leaning over as if to vomit. I mumbled, “What’s wrong?” through a mouth still full. Calfgrit9 just rocked and made gagging sounds. When I got to him, he pointed to himself trying to communicate. I thought he was about to throw up, as that seems to be a common activity with all kids.

I managed to swallow my the food filling my mouth, and told him to go to the bathroom to throw up. He wouldn’t move, and just rocked back and forth. I had my hands on him by this time and tried to move him towards the bathroom. He wasn’t speaking, but continued gagging and pointing to himself. Then he hacked up a half-eaten grape.

He finally caught his breath and told me he had been choking. Holy crap! I got him to talk to me about what had happened for two reasons: one to make sure his airway was clear, and two to learn exactly what had happened.

He had been eating grapes, and one got lodged in his throat. I felt awful. Here, my son had almost choked to death, and I had only ordered him to the bathroom because I thought he was just throwing up. Had I realized what was actually happening, I could have helped him. Had he not cleared his throat on his own, he might have died.

Fortunately, the situation ended well, with only a scare. But when the realization got through my head over the next few minutes, it really shook me.

Later in the day, when both boys were in the house, I talked with them about the universal sign for choking. Calfgrit13 already knew it, from school. But Calfgrit9 was just learning about it then, from me. I made sure they both fully understood how and when to make the sign, and what it means when someone else makes the sign.

Seriously — teach your children the universal sign for choking. It may save their life one day.

The situation with me telling my choking son to go to the bathroom to vomit brings up another thing. There are a lot of times that parents seem to be slow to help their children when they’re in distress. To a non-parent, this will often look like a sign of neglect. But as experienced parents, we get so used to certain things happening so much, like vomiting and falling down, that we automatically assume a current situation is just like every similar situation before it.

For instance, just today: I was running around the lake trail for exercise when I passed a mom and son on the trail. The mom was walking, and the boy, (probably about 9), was on a Razor scooter. The boy was already several yards ahead of his mom, going down hill, and a few seconds after I passed him, I heard the metal scrap and vocal shout of him falling down. I stopped and looked back.

The boy was sitting on the ground, holding his knees, and making the hissing sounds everyone makes.

As illustrated by Peter Griffin:

I was closer to the kid than his mom was, so I turned around and jogged to him. “Are you okay, buddy,” I asked. “Can you stand up?” I held out my hand to him. He looked at my hand a moment, then let go of his knees and took my hand. I pulled him up to standing. As his mother go to us, I turned to her and said, “No blood.”

As she knelt down to check him over, she said, “I just kept walking, waiting for you to stand up and say you were alright.”

Seeing they were okay, I took off running again. I totally understood her position and thought process. Kids fall all the time. All the time. And 9 times out of 10, they get right back up and continue whatever activity they were doing. No harm, no worry.

I checked on the kid because I was right there, not because I felt his mother wasn’t concerned. I knew she was concerned, like any mother would be, but like all parents who’ve been lulled into the pattern that kids’ set, she sort of got caught in the rut for a few moments. Sometimes being in that pattern makes us slower to respond to real emergencies that don’t look obviously like a real emergency. (Fortunately, though, this fall wasn’t actually an emergency, anyway.) Then we feel like bad parents when someone else reacts to our children quicker than we do. But we’re not bad parents for this. We’re just used to the pattern, and we get surprised sometimes when the situation turns out to be outside the long-set patterns.

Bullgrit