Boy no fan of 'needle point'

AMERICAN FORK — Doctors working in emergency rooms aren't surprised when children come in with peanuts or raisins stuck inside noses.

Nor is it rare to see children who have swallowed pennies, nickels and dimes.

"If you can imagine it," Dr. Morgan Grant says, "a kid has done it."

But Grant, an anesthesiologist who is on-call at American Fork Hospital, recently experienced a first when a 13-year-old boy got a sewing needle stuck in his throat.

The needle's head was lodged over the vocal cords. The shaft of the needle went over the vocal cords and through the esophagus. The tip was in between discs near the spinal cord.

The tip was so close to the spinal cord that doctors worried about it slipping and paralyzing the boy. Key to the procedure was planning, Grant said, because he had never encountered such a case during his career.

"It'll be my guess there's probably not another injury or case like this in the country this year. It's one of those bizarre things you hear about," said Grant, who successfully removed the needle.

The boy, Taylor Hansen, suffered a sore throat after the procedure. He is recovering from muscle spasms in his neck that he started getting a few weeks after the needle-removing procedure in mid-December. Doctors do not know if they're related, his mother said.

Here's how it happened: Taylor, goofing around, put the needle, tip-first, in his mouth. The ball-shaped head was outside of his mouth.

"He was waiting for the computer. He was in the office where we have the sewing machine," his mother, Janine Hansen, said.

Taylor sneezed, which caused the pin to go to the back of the tongue. He opened his mouth to remove it, but sneezed again. It went down the throat, Janine Hansen said.

He began to choke, cough and vomit, but did not spit up the needle. Taylor's father called the ER at American Fork Hospital, and staff were waiting for him when he arrived.

They took X-rays, which Grant called "fascinating." He could see the entire needle.

"It couldn't have been in a worse place," he said.

Doctors decided to remove the needle at the American Fork hospital because a helicopter ride to a Salt Lake hospital was deemed too risky. Any movement could have pushed the needle into his spinal cord.

Grant decided to take Taylor to an operating room. He told the parents that it was more risky to do nothing than to remove the needle.

"I tried to be really tough. I had full confidence in them," Janine Hansen said. "As they took him behind the doors, I lost it."

Grant's plan was to remove the needle with forceps. However, there were considerations such as administering anesthesia on a full stomach. Taylor had eaten pizza before he swallowed the needle.