The Time I Almost Killed Myself But Was Too Afraid To Tell My Parents

I must have been about six years old, although I can't remember for sure. We were living on Crandall, and my uncle and grandmother were living with us at the time, so I feel like my estimation of "about six years old" is fairly accurate. It was Christmas time, which, as we all know, is a magical, wonderful time for Christian children where we eat a lot of junk food, open presents, our family members quarrel in the kitchen, and Elvis Presley plays non-stop for about a week.

Let's face it. Nothing says the birth of Christ like Elvis crooning "Blue Christmas".

Anyway, Elvis was blaring in the living room, the adults were in the kitchen doing things such as cooking, eating, cleaning, etc., and my little brother was otherwise occupied. He was probably doing something like beating the wall with a wooden sword, throwing Tonka trucks, or breaking random things around the house. I was in the living room with Charlie, our dog, and the Christmas tree.

Christmas time is also a time of copious amounts of treats and candies. Besides the cookies and candy my mother and grandmother made from scratch carefully and with love over the course of the entire month, we also bought certain candies. One of those store bought candies was those hard strawberry flavored things wrapped in the plastic to make them look like strawberries. I loved those things, and we only bought them at Christmas.

So I was eating one of those strawberry things in the living room, dancing like a crazy person (an activity I still enjoy as an adult). It was probably the third or fourth time the cassette tape had automatically restarted itself, but Elvis can never get old. Since everyone else was in the kitchen, I had a little more floor space than usual to do my dancing. I started running from one side of the room to the other, doing a dramatic leap with my head bent backwards before turning around.

One of my parents hollered at me from the kitchen to cut it out because I was going to swallow my candy and choke and die. But then they got distracted by something or other, and so I returned to my dance routine. It probably looked like I was running back and forth and when I reached the end of the room, I suddenly convulsed in the air, momentarily writhing in pain. Then I turned around and did it again.

Eventually, on one particularly enthusiastic leap where I bent my head back a little extra and made it more of a whole body move, I inhaled the candy. As I started choking, my first thought was, "not "I'm going to die! I should get help from someone who knows CPR!" My first thought was. "Oh no! They told me to stop or I would choke and die! Now I'm choking and dying! They're going to be so mad I didn't listen!" So I skulked behind the Christmas tree, squatting and trying to clear my airway.

I did manage to start breathing again on my own which was pretty much a Christmas miracle. Of course I was less concerned about my recent near death experience and more concerned with hiding my recent crime of not listening and nearly dying. For the rest of the evening I was extra good, on my guard, and half convinced that the adults in my family could see the candy, which was obviously still lodged firmly inside my lungs.

A couple of months later, I had to get a series of x-rays. I hadn't yet acquired my phobia of doctors and their testing having had few terribly unpleasant medical experiences at that point in my life, but I was still nervous. In my perfectly rational six year old mind, I was positive that the candy would show up on the x-ray. There it would be, red and everything, lodged right into my left lung. The wrapper would probably have re-materialized, making it even easier to identify. The doctors would be confused and write about it in medical journals, but my parents would know exactly what had happened. They would know right away that months earlier I hadn't listened. Months earlier I had choked on a piece of candy and nearly died.

Then they'd probably yell at me.