Child's life saved at SSKM Hospital after chicken bone stuck in throat
A Tiny Chicken Bone Almost Cost a Two-Year-Old Everything
A family celebration turned into a total nightmare in seconds. We all know the joy of a big holiday feast. You pass the plates. You laugh. You eat. But for one family from Malda, that familiar joy vanished when their two-year-old suddenly stopped breathing.
What was supposed to be a tasty chicken dinner became a race against the clock. A tiny fragment of bone got wedged right in the child’s subglottis. That is the very top part of the windpipe. It’s an absolute nightmare scenario. The airway was suddenly partially blocked. The little one’s oxygen levels crashed fast. They couldn’t pull enough air into their lungs to survive. Carbon dioxide started building up. The blood stopped getting fresh oxygen. The family didn’t wait around. They rushed the toddler straight to the emergency ward at SSKM Hospital in Kolkata. It was the absolute best move they could have made under extreme duress.
What actually happened here is simple. A two-year-old child from Malda choked on a chicken bone during a New Year meal. The bone blocked the upper airway, causing severe oxygen loss. Doctors at SSKM Hospital quickly performed a rigid bronchoscopy to safely remove the bone and save the child’s life.
How close was this to a tragedy?
It breaks my heart to read about things like this, mostly because it happens far more often than we think. We often hand toddlers pieces of meat, assuming we got all the bones out. But children under three just don’t have the airway capacity to deal with our mistakes. Dr. Sayan Hazra and his team at SSKM are the real heroes here. They used a specialized procedure called rigid bronchoscopy to fish out the blockage. The margin for error was virtually zero. The subglottis is highly sensitive. Blockages here don’t just stop breathing. They can permanently damage vocal cords. If they had waited even a few more minutes, the lack of oxygen would have caused permanent brain damage or worse. As a news editor who sees countless tragic medical reports, this particular story serves as a massive wake-up call for parents everywhere. Always double-check your child’s food. Mash it up. Feel it with your own fingers before you serve it. We get way too comfortable during holiday meals. We let our guard down when the dining room is loud and chaotic. This brilliant medical team managed to pull off a miracle under intense pressure. Under the watchful eye of Director Dr. Arunabha Sengupta, the surgical and anesthesia teams worked seamlessly. Doctors Divya Daga, Bhaskar Biswas, and Purba Ghosh stepped up alongside the anesthetists. They did not hesitate. They gave a panicked family their baby back. That is exactly the kind of uplifting human news we desperately need to start our year.
