A young British mom has shared her embarrassing mistake — one that caused her to rush her baby to the ER, thinking he had a huge hole in his mouth.
Becky Stiles, 24-year-old mom-of-three told the Sun she was horrified when she saw the large dark red “hole” in the roof of 10-month-old son Harvey’s mouth while she was changing his diaper at their home in Essex.
“I tried to touch it but he just screamed at me, so I made his dad rush over and see it,” Stiles said, adding she was “shaking, sweating and holding back the tears.”
“We put a torch [flashlight] on it and his dad said, ‘What the hell is that?’” she recalled.
Stiles’ mother suggested they rush Harvey straight to a hospital. They dropped their two older children off with their grandparents before driving 30 minutes to the nearest ER.
At the hospital, staff initially was prepared to race Harvey to a specialist until a nurse shone her pen flashlight into his mouth.
“After about 30 seconds of looking, she said, ‘That’s a sticker,’” Stiles recalled. She initially argued the diagnosis and insisted it was a hole.
However, the nurse simply “put her finger in his mouth and hooked it out,” Stiles said.
“I laughed, was shaking and so embarrassed … I told her I felt like a right prat,” she said. She also said that she would have hugged the nurse if it weren’t prohibited by Covid-19 safety protocols.
“She replied with, ‘Well, I’ve never fixed a cleft palate at A&E doors before,’” Stiles recalled the nurse saying.
“We all carried on laughing as we made the walk of shame back to the car,” she said, saying she then had to call all the family members who helped to report that “Harvey didn’t in fact have a hole in his mouth” but merely “had taken a liking to stickers.”
Wow
I might have done the same thing myself had it been one of my boys.