Every new parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle knows that it can be pretty challenging to truly baby-proof your home.
Sometimes, it seems like for every sharp corner safely encased in rubber, there’s another potentially dangerous detail left unchecked, as demonstrated in this chilling video about the risk involved in forgetting to anchor heavy pieces of furniture.
There are also a handful of less visible hazards that are easy to forget about. It’s in the nature of all kids to be curious and explore the world around them, sometimes inadvertently putting themselves in danger along the way.
Unfortunately, for every kid who eats a tiny army man or sticks a jelly bean up a nose and comes out unscathed, there’s another little one who ends up in real danger due to a tiny and easy-to-miss risk.
Now, after a terrifying experience with her youngest child, one mom is campaigning to bring one of these miniscule-but-deadly perils to light, via her website, Emmett’s Fight, and the connected Facebook page.
Please note, some of the following images contain graphic medical content.
Today, Karla Rauch is the proud mother of two bright and bouncing kids, Ethan, 7, (right) and Emmett, 5 (left).
But just four years ago, Karla and her husband Michael were on the brink of losing Emmett, after the then-1-year-old tot swallowed a tiny lithium button battery.
The battery, a tiny round object roughly the size and shape of a nickel like the object pictured above, had fallen out of the back of the remote control for the family’s DVD player.
This tiny mishap turned out to be the first step in a terrifying string of events…
Little Emmett, who had just celebrated his first birthday, found the battery and swallowed it.
His parents didn’t catch him in the act, but they noticed immediately when he became lethargic, out-of-sorts, and feverish.
Concerned, they took him to the doctor, where they were told it was just a cold, and that Emmett would be fine.
A few days later, when Emmett started coughing blood, the doctor thought it was a simple case of the croup, but followed a gut instinct, and instructed them to rush to the ER.
There, a team of emergency room staffers found the button battery on an x-ray, and realized that the acid from the tiny object had drastically damaged the little boy’s esophagus and digestive tract.
Thankfully, Emmett is a fighter. He somehow pulled through, despite the severity of his injuries, and the brave little tyke went on to fight his way through 65 surgeries over the course of four years.
Now, he’s a happy little boy of five, who can finally breathe on his own, play soccer, eat some real food, and speak thanks to artificial vocal cords.
But parents Karla and Michael don’t take his recovery lightly.
They know how lucky they are, and have made it a mission to tell as many parents as possible about the dangers of button batteries through their activism and website.
