A seven-month-old girl was taken to hospital Saturday by concerned parents after an area just below her jaw swelled up to the size of one and a half golf balls with a pimple on top. After initially diagnosing an infection, doctors were shocked when they discovered a two-inch-long black feather had got lodged underneath Mya Whittington’s skin.
Aaron and Emma Whittington first took their nearly seven-month-old daughter to Hutchinson Regional Medical Center, Kansas on Saturday after the area below her jaw swelled up. ‘They thought it was a swollen gland,’ Aaron Whittington said.
The hospital administered an antibiotic and sent the family home. Mya’s grandmother took her back to the hospital after a ‘pimple’ appeared on the swollen area, which had now grown to the size of about one and a half golf balls, Aaron Whittington said. The physician suspected a staph infection on her lymph nodes.
A doctor broke the pimple to try to drain it and drew marks on her face to measure whether the swelling increased. The intravenous antibiotics were continued. On Monday, the doctor on rounds scraped off a scab that formed. After the doctor left, the Whittingtons noted what appeared to be a string or stick emerging from the spot. They left it alone, since the doctor hadn’t done anything to it, Aaron said.
‘She’s been pulling on the left side of her face for a couple of months,’ Emma said, but she suspected it was teething or an ear infection. In her 20 years on the pediatric floor at the hospital, RN Sandra Mathis has never seen the like, though she recalls a child coming in once with hairbrush bristles stuck in its tonsils that had to be removed, from chewing on a brush.
The Whittingtons’ doctor indicated the swelling had to be causing an immense amount of pain, Emma said, but Mya cried mostly only when nurses have poked her. Her ordeal isn’t over yet, however. The swollen area has a hard knot in it about four centimeters in size. If the knot doesn’t break up on its own, Mya is headed for surgery in Wichita to remove it.
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