Don't let the kids choke to death.
Guys I need to share with you some tips and techniques to know what to do when a small kid is choking on food. Last night a neighbour kid was eating some candy and started choking, turning blue in front of her mother and father who didn't knew what to do. The kid is like 2 years old and some people started introducing their finger in his mouth roughly, trying to take what was obstructing the respiratory tract, it was worse after it. His mother started screaming because he was passing out with his face turning blue.
The first thing we need to do in this case is remain calm. If we start screaming, crying, running and jumping we won't resolve anything and we can even make everything worse. The kid can get scared and if there was a possibility for him to cough and get free of the obstruction you can take it away just by not transfering them hope and .
Going crazy won't help. Please remain calm and convey calm to the kid.
The time is gold and we must act quickly knowing exactly what we need to do. If we aren't sure of the technique and how to proceed then we need to look for help really fast.
Depending on how old is the kid we can use different techniques, but it will also depend on what kind of obstruction it is. There can be a simple obstruction that can be removed coughing several times.
There's partial obstruction that can be easily turned into severe or total due to the kid's reaction or our own reaction. The next step is to slap on the back of the kid standing up if we know that the obstrution is partial. If the obstruction is more complex and he takes his or her hands to the neck then we must turn the kid horizontally and slap the back of the child with consistency. We can make this kind of technique until certain age and height, from babies to maybe three or four years old.
We must look if what's obstructing the throat gets out to the floor (sometimes it stays inside their mouth) and we must be able to feel if the child start breathing. If we feel that we must take the child and make sure he is breathing.
To the kids that are bigger, they can't be carried to be horizontal and perform the maneuver. In this cases we must perform the Heimlich Maneuver with certain use of strength considering that is a child we are dealing with.
This maneuver consist on standing behind the child, passing our arms from the back to the front of the child under their arms, putting our hands in certain way together (look to the pictures), then pushing in and up towards the abdominal diaphragm (repeating it). Sometimes we'll found ourselves in the need to perform this kind of technique to smaller childs too, but it's recomended only if the back slaps don't work correctly.
There's a way we can make this process to babies also, but it will depend on the kind of obstruction the baby has. When the back slaps don't work, we can grab the baby with one hand, put the baby with the head pointing to the floor grabbing him on the neck resting our arm on our leg, then using two fingers of the other hand to make the push on the diaphragm towards the respiratory tract. We must do this procedure several times and dealing with the intensity required to get the object or the food out.
Somebody who is able to do this procedure is better to be preprared to make cardiopulmonary resuscitation because as I said starting to write this, time is gold. If we make all the techniques and for some reason all of them fail we'll be soon starting resuscitation, so we better be prepared. If we get to the resuscitation phase we'll need to manually remove the object or food from the throat with our hand because if we don't then then CPR won't work even with all our best wishes.
I'm sharing all of this because yesterday I was able to save a 2 years old kid's life because of those techniques. The mother was thinking that he was already dead and panic, screaming "my child died mom" and many other things, so I was alarmed. I was listening, because all of it was going on outside of the house I'm living now and I just ran outside, there were two people trying to do something for the kid but it was all wrong and they were getting everything worse for him. So I got there and took the kid away from them, got him on my left arm horizontally facing down and gave him about five or six slaps in the back, in and up towards the respiratory tract. I felt that he was able to start breathing with the fourth slap and stopped after two more to hear his lungs, put my ear to his chest and he was looking at me, he wasn't blue anymore.
We got internet people, we can look for information and be prepared for things like this that can end in the lost of the life of our loved ones, but the information needs to be absorved before the emergency arrives. I know some people can be really nervous about something like this, but you have to choose between nerve and their life, because something as simple a eat food, that we do everyday, can turn into this scenario. It wasn't my first time doing this maneuver because I work as a paramedic for nine years but please, don't let the kids choke to death.
Written by Kirvic L. Aguilera
All images are borrowed from each source for educational purposes only.