Nobody knew what was troubling 7-month-old Mya Washington and when she was finally hospitalized, they found it.
What they discovered was a 2-inch feather that was embedded inside of her neck.
“We were just pretty much in disbelief,” Mya’s father, Aaron Whittington, 26, told ABC News.
“I was at work and my wife noticed that the left side of her neck had started to swell, and she called me at work and asked if we should take her to the emergency room,” Whittington said in the 2012 report.
And doctors aren’t sure how it even got in there.
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“As far as how the feather got into the side of the neck, our doctor says we'll probably never really know,” he said. “But her best guess is that she either inhaled it or tried swallowing it and it got lodged in the throat somewhere, and the body, just being crazy, just started to reject it and force it out the side of her neck.”
But there’s a theory.
Aaron, who is from Hutchinson, Kansas, told CBS News that doctors think Mya put the feather in her mouth and it then got stuck in her throat. Then, her body tried to eject the foreign item through her neck.
“It just started to reject it and forced it out,” Aaron added.
“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.
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