Home WORLD NEWS ‘I watched life leave his eyes’: Parents warn against metal straws after 4-year-old is stabbed in the throat

‘I watched life leave his eyes’: Parents warn against metal straws after 4-year-old is stabbed in the throat

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‘I watched life leave his eyes’: Parents warn against metal straws after 4-year-old is stabbed in the throat

Stony Brook University Hospital

It was a beautiful June day on Long Island, and Crystal DeFraia was waiting for a technician to service her family’s new in-ground pool, which she envisioned would be at the center of a fun-filled summer break.

Before he arrived, she offered snacks to her daughter, Madison, 8, and her son, Charlie, 4. The boy picked his favorite drinkable yogurt, which he enjoyed slurping through a metal straw.

She was in the backyard chatting about the pool when she heard her daughter scream. Madison appeared, a look of horror on her face.

Charlie, she said – he fell off the porch.

Crystal ran to find her son covered with blood. At first, she thought Charlie had broken his nose or bitten his lip, but there was too much blood.

Madison, 8, and Charlie DeFraia, 4, playing in the backyard of their Long Island home.

“As his heart is beating, that amount of blood is pumping out of his mouth,” she said. “My husband pounded on his back and a big clot of blood came out of his mouth and into his hands.”

While waiting for the ambulance, Crystal’s husband, Charles, kept the boy on his stomach to avoid choking. Emergency responders were only five minutes away, but he wasn’t sure his son was going to make it.

“He essentially bled out in our front lawn,” Charles said. “I watched life leave his eyes.”

The ambulance arrived and rushed Charlie to Stony Brook Trauma Center. As his parents backed down the driveway to follow by car, Crystal spotted her son’s yogurt drink on the porch.

The sight of the shiny metal straw lying in a pool of her son’s blood still haunts her. 

‘A first’ for such an injuryWhen Charlie arrived at Stony Brook about 15 minutes later on, Dr. Richard Scriven, chief of pediatric trauma surgery, found the boy within minutes of cardiac arrest.

The emergency medical team on duty June 20 began blood infusions, but that only caused him to bleed more. That’s when Scriven and his colleagues realized Charlie’s carotid artery – a major artery that carries blood from the heart to the head – must have been punctured.

They used gauze to pack off the back of Charlie’s throat to stop the bleeding and intubated him. A CT scan confirmed the team’s suspicions: The boy’s right carotid artery and jugular vein had been punctured by the metal straw and were bleeding into his neck tissues and through a tear in the back of his throat.

“We’ve seen dozens of kids with straw perforations in the back of the mouth, but never before had one penetrated the carotid artery,” Scriven said. “This was a first.”

Doctors didn’t have much time. They had to repair the artery not just to stop the bleeding but to restore blood flow to the right side of Charlie’s brain. Each passing minute increased his risk of a devastating stroke.

An MRI image of Charlie’s brain shows areas of stroke on the right side as a result of the lack of blood flow to the brain.

The location of the injury made things more complicated.

“The injury was very high up near Charlie’s skull base, making it too risky to approach surgically,” said Dr. David Chesler, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Stony Brook.

He called Dr. David Fiorella, director of the Stony Brook Cerebrovascular Center, who quickly recognized Charlie’s case required specialties beyond most hospitals’ capabilities. The trauma center had them all.

Through a small puncture in Charlie’s leg, doctors worked through his femoral artery into a channel past the torn part of the carotid artery. They used several telescoping stents to reconstruct the injured artery, reopening a stable channel of blood flow to Charlie’s brain.

Doctors finished the reconstruction with a self-expanding stent that formed a watertight seal over the hole in Charlie’s carotid artery.

“Ten years ago, we didn’t have access to these devices,” Fiorella said.

An X-ray shows the stents placed to reconstruct the portion of Charlie’s carotid artery, which had been damaged by the metal straw.

Charlie was stabilized and brought to the pediatric intensive care unit, where he was put on a ventilator and sedated in a medically induced coma.

All that was left to do was wait.

Scans showed minimal damage to brain tissue, but Crystal and Charles weren’t sure what to expect when their son finally woke up.

“We knew who he was that afternoon,” Crystal said. “But by the evening … we didn’t know if we would meet that Charlie, again.”

Back to lifeDays went by with little change.

“I felt like a shell of a human,” Crystal said. Charles felt an “unrelenting heaviness” on his heart.

Doctors warned Charlie may not be able to talk right away or remember how to use the bathroom. His parents began preparing for a son they might not recognize.

Charlie was taken off the ventilator on June 27, a week after his accident. A few hours later, he opened his eyes and spoke his first words.

“Mom, can I have a fruit snack?”

Stony Brook Medicine nurse practitioner Krista O’Donnell with Charlie DeFraia, 4, as he plays with sand to regain use and strength of his hand and arm.

Crystal cracked a genuine smile for the first time that week. The Charlie she knew loved fruit snacks.

“We knew he was in there,” she said.

Charlie was discharged from the hospital a week later. Doctors said leaving so soon after his accident was nothing short of a miracle, but there was still a lot of work to do, including physical therapy, speech therapy and therapy for fine motor skills.

“We are so proud of our multi-disciplinary team’s unique expertise and experience that allow patients like young Charlie get back to his life again,” Fiorella said.

While they had never seen a case as severe as Charlie’s, his doctor said metal straws have been the cause of many injuries seen at the trauma center. They warned Americans to consider other environmentally friendly straws, like paper or silicon.

“For children, metal straws are not the way to go,” Scriven said.

Plastic straws are trash: Are there alternatives that don’t suck?

Dr. David Fiorella describes the severity of Charlie DeFraia’s injury and procedure to reconstruct his carotid artery.

More: Metal drinking straw fatally impales woman through her eye after fall

Crystal threw out all the metal straws in her house as soon as she returned from the hospital and shares her story as a cautionary tale.

Charlie is starting kindergarten, and there’s no evidence of his injury except a small scar on his inner thigh and a slight lisp, a result of the straw having punctured the back of his tongue.

It could have ended very differently, Charles said, if the ambulance arrived a minute later, if Stony Brook doctors didn’t specialize in neurointerventional therapies, if Charlie was just a few years older.

Much of Charlie’s success, Fiorella said, is a result of the capacity of his young brain to recover, called neuroplasticity, which people lose as they get older.

“A lot of things went into Charlie’s favor that day,” his dad said. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t look at him flabbergasted that he’s alive.”

Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT. 

Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.

(From left to right) Dr. David Chesler, Charles DeFraia, Charlie DeFraia, Madison DeFraia, Crystal DeFraia and Dr. Richard Scriven reunite Aug. 9, 2022.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Parents warn against metal straws after New York boy stabbed in throat

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