North Carolina toddler bleeds to death 4 days after swallowing button battery that burned through his organs
GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA: A little boy lost his life after accidentally swallowing a button battery that burned through his organs. Johnathan Huff, affectionately called Nugget, tragically died on December 20, after eating the tiny battery on December 16, which burned his oesophagus, intestines, and aorta resulting in catastrophic bleeding. The Daily Mail reported that Johnathan’s parents -- Jackie Huff, a physician assistant by profession, and paramedic AJ Huff -- first thought a viral infection was responsible for the toddler’s occasional nosebleeds and raised temperature. But they became worried after Johnathan began throwing up vast amounts of blood, had fits, and fell unconscious at home.
The day when the child breathed his last, his father performed CPR on him and the mother blew rescue breaths while waiting for ambulance crews. But the tiny tot died before the help arrived. Later, an autopsy disclosed that Johnathan had the disposable battery in his intestines, which the devastated parents thought was from a keyfinder remote. They are now sharing their heartbreaking story so that no other family has to suffer what they went through. “Johnathan's passing has been devastating. It's not the way that life's supposed to go. As morbid as it sounds, Johnathan should be picking where we would be buried, hopefully decades from now, not the other way round. How do you pick a nice spot in the ground for your child? When we had Johnathan after [his four-year-old brother] Michael my mommy heart was complete. It's just such a shocking blow to go from being this perfect little family to neither of us having any idea what we're supposed to do now,” Jackie said.
On December 16 -- the day Johnathan ingested the battery -- parents reportedly woke up their kids twenty minutes before they were required to leave for daycare. The mother said maybe during that morning rush their younger one ate the battery, which they placed on a countertop 4.5ft from the floor. “AJ and I have gone over in our heads a million times and we have no idea, we can only imagine it was during that 20-minute time span. At some point one of us didn't have eyes on him. We know all this now because of how everything played out but the assumption is that the battery came from that remote. We kept all remotes up out of their reach on a bar counter about 4.5 feet up. I stuck all the remotes in a little pail to keep them together. The back of the remote was off when we found it but of course the battery wasn't in there. There's no way it fell off the counter but Johnathan had only just got tall enough to use the barstool to reach up to it. There's no lock on the remote back, one little tiny push and it falls right off,” Jackie stated.
It has been said that till lunchtime on December 16, Johnathan was fine at the daycare. However, during his post-lunch nap, it was found by his teachers that he had a nosebleed before vomiting blood. Paramedics were soon called, who checked the tot and advised the parents to visit a pediatrician for a check-up. The 35-year-old was quoted as saying, “He seemed perfectly fine while we were getting him ready. Michael's big brother duty was to walk Johnathan inside school, he would hold his hand and walk him down the hallway to class. During naptime the teacher said he was asleep for about ten minutes and then they discovered he had a puddle of blood around his face, around the size of a dinner plate. When the teacher called and said he was vomiting blood my heart stopped. I'm less than a minute's drive from the school so I dropped everything at work and drove over there. I beat the ambulance and when I got there he was sat in one of the teacher's lap, he looked very pale and really tired, but his vital signs looked good. The paramedics said it was a nosebleed and that the blood probably dripped down his nose, down the back of his throat and irritated his stomach, made him nauseous and throw up. It's a reasonable explanation and it's exactly what I would say as a medical professional, 100%.”
A pediatrician checked Johnathan and agreed with the paramedics’ explanation. The next day, December 17 seemed good for the little one, who mostly had a good day at daycare. But in the evening, he suffered a high fever, and Jackie and AJ rushed him to the doctor, who suggested it may be a viral illness. His Covid-19 test was also used along with a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia. At the time, it was believed he suffered from a common infection called bronchiolitis. “When the doctor called me and said to take it easy and keep him hydrated through the weekend, sounded good to me. There was no battery on that x-ray picture, the only explanation is that the battery must have already traveled lower than the chest at this point,” Jackie said.
She continued, “We spent all day on Saturday snuggled on the couch and watched his favorite TV show -- he absolutely loved Bubble Guppies. Johnathan was tired but nothing else. His fever seemed to break midway through the day on Saturday and he wanted some Dorito chips, which we thought was a good sign that his little appetite was back.” But the parents’ worst nightmare was yet to come as on December 20 morning, Johnathan had a very high fever and he coughed up some blood. “He'd been sitting snuggled up on my lap since he woke up then at about 6.45 am he coughed really hard, jumped out of my lap and coughed up blood. I looked up both nostrils and down his throat with a flashlight and I didn't see any blood at all, then he started smiling and seemed fine,” Jackie said.
“We put him down to nap but at around 9 am I heard him cough really hard on the monitor. I picked him up, then he coughed again and vomited bright red blood all down my shirt. It was a lot, it was very shocking. I pulled my phone out to get directions to the nearest hospital and while AJ was holding Johnathan I glanced over at him and he was posturing like he was having a seizure. AJ said he could feel him go limp in his arms. His hands drew up, his lips turned blue and he was unconscious. AJ called 911 while I held him. Our professional instincts kicked in, I kept his airway open and checked his pulse - just doing a normal assessment head to toe. I then handed him over to AJ and that was when he said Johnathan's pulse slowly started going down. He could feel his heart beating and then it was beating slower and slower and his heart stopped. He just went into full-blown paramedic mode, if you lose a heartbeat you start CPR and that's exactly what he did. AJ gave compressions and I did the rescue breathing. I pinched his nose and I blew air but when I blew the air down into his lungs it was like blowing under water. There was no air going in and when I took my mouth off bright red blood just gurgled out of him. We rolled him over on our bed to make sure we cleared his airways a couple of times, this went on for three minutes until paramedics arrived, but it felt like hours,” she explained.
The ambulance rushed Johnathan to Moses H. Cone Hospital in North Carolina, but the child could not be saved. Jackie said, “The ER doctor immediately walked over to me and started the speech, the speech that I've given people so many times. I knew as soon as he started talking, from the tone of his voice and him saying 'we've done everything that we can', I knew that he was dead. I just broke down. The nurses said that they tried to draw blood for labs but he had no blood in his body anymore, none.” The baby's remains were buried in Kentucky on December 27. “Johnathan's funeral was a blur, it still is. I've been telling people that our entire life is on pause at the moment. Michael was in the room with us while we were doing CPR so he witnessed all of it. Of course he doesn't have any clue what death is, we've told him Johnathan is in heaven with baby Jesus. Michael says 'when he's done playing with him, he'll come back'. On the one hand it's comforting he sees it so simplistically but of course knowing that's not happening is devastating.”