A baby began choking in an Irmo restaurant. Here’s how a stranger stepped in to save him
For a few minutes on Sunday, Sept. 12, the Koehlers lived through every parent’s worst nightmare.
While the family of five were eating breakfast at the Eggs Up Grill on Dutch Fork Road, their 10-month-old son, Gabriel, began to choke on a piece of pancake. They tried patting him on the back. Jayne Koehler even tipped the boy forward head first, trying to dislodge the food. But soon she was calling for help, when it became clear her youngest child might be in serious trouble.
For her husband, Jon Koehler, watching in horror with his 5- and 3-year-old daughters, those tense moments brought back memories of the couple’s first child, a premature daughter who died in a hospital NICU the day after she was born.
“I remember turning away and I audibly said, ‘I can’t lose another child,’” he said. “My wife knew and I knew that he was going to die.”
But the family would end up being saved by the quick intervention of others in the restaurant, including a stranger who just happened to come to breakfast prepared for the worst.
Koehler said he and his wife are always careful with what Gabriel eats because he also had health problems from an early age. When he was born, he required corrective surgery to his esophagus before he could leave the hospital, which left the child with a smaller than usual opening to swallow food. Jayne Koehler was cutting up a pancake into smaller pieces for the baby when she noticed Gabriel had apparently swiped a larger piece, about the size of a half-dollar, off her plate and eaten it.
“We looked in his mouth and stared at him a minute, and he seemed fine,” Jon Koehler said. “But then he started coughing.”
As the parents became more frantic about the baby, the scene brought a halt to both servers and diners in the crowded restaurant, packed as usual on a Sunday morning. Owner Steve Perry came out of the kitchen when told somebody was choking. Two former nurses came over to help, but increasingly vigorous back blows didn’t seem to separate the pancake from his tiny body.
Jon Koehler said he could see the color starting to drain away from his son’s face. “He was blue,” the father said.
When Koehler stepped away to call 911, he saw a man come in with some kind of medical device in a clear plastic bag. “I thought he was an EMT.”
But actually Major Hillard was just another customer eating breakfast with his family. When he saw the baby choking, he remembered a device he had bought five years earlier, in case one of his young children ended up in the same situation.
“When my daughter was very young, she had a tendency to choke on biscuits, bread,” Hillard said. “I did research on CPR and whatnot, and I came across this device.”
He had a LifeVac anti-choking device, a plastic face mask connected to a compression plunger meant to create a suction effect that pulls the obstruction out of a choking victim’s throat.
The device doesn’t require FDA approval, but Dr. David Ford, an emergency medicine director at Prisma Health, has followed scientific studies of such anti-choking devices. While LifeVac has been successful in studies done on cadavers, researchers have been limited in what they can do since they can’t ethically “put something down someone’s threat and then try to get it out.”
“Cadavers might be the best we have right now until EMS start carrying it on trucks,” Ford said, adding he knows of some units have started using it on a trial basis.
The doctor recommends first following the steps recommended by the Red Cross, including back blows and, on older children, the Heimlich maneuver. With small children, parents may also be able to reach into the child’s mouth and remove the obstruction with their fingers.
In this case, Hillard was able to lay out Gabriel on another table, pushing aside another couple’s meal with his arms, and applied the face mask while Perry, the owner, held the child’s head steady. The nurses and an Irmo police officer who had just finished breakfast looked on. With a few quick thrusts he was able to get Gabriel’s airways clear of the pancake.
“The second time he did it, I could see a piece of it come out his nose, and then another one and a piece came out his mouth,” Perry said.
“The baby started doing these big gulps, then made a face like he was going to cry,” Hillard said.
A short time later, an ambulance arrived to take mother and baby to the hospital, but those at the restaurant agree if they had waited for professional help to arrive, the child probably would have either died or suffered serious brain damage because of the lack of oxygen.
After a night at Richland Children’s Hospital for observation, Gabriel is now back to normal. His father says he was the least affected by what happened a week earlier.
“I’ve never seen anybody choke in my life,” Jon Koehler said. “It happened in a blink of an eye. He went from coughing to ‘he’s blue and not breathing.’ Those four minutes felt like half an hour.”
Hillard sees a divine hand behind the chain of events that led them there. The family just decided to stop by Eggs Up that morning, and only took his wife’s car — in which the device had sat untouched for about five years — because she needed gas.
“Jon came over to me afterward crying, and I just said, ‘Thank God. He was with me today,’” Hillard said.
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