Little Joshua Ward desperately wants a peanut. And he won’t smile until he can pop one into his mouth, lick the salt off, then place it delicately into his hand to be carried to a neat pile of discarded peanuts outside.
oum Lara is happy to see Joshua trying new foods, but reminds him he must not swallow the peanut. Her son doesn’t have allergies though – it’s just that he hasn’t eaten solid food in nearly two-and-a-half years.
Joshua, who has just turned four, swallowed highly caustic dishwashing powder when he was 19 months old, burning and severely damaging his upper airway. He remains unable to eat normally so he’s tube-fed. But he’s still keen to try food and drink, and has even been found licking the condensation off the windows.
The damage means Joshua has had to have a tracheotomy, a hole made in his windpipe to allow him to breathe. He has had 44 surgical procedures, mostly to remove scar tissue from around his upper airway, and every night Lara gets up between five to 15 times to clear Joshua’s tracheotomy tube.
No-one knows what the future holds for this brave little boy.
Reconstructive surgery may one day be possible but, for now, Lara, her husband Nigel, elder daughter Stephanie and Joshua take life as it comes.
“He’s a normal little boy who wants to be like every other child so he can get very frustrated from time to time when he can’t do the same things other kids do,” says Lara, who describes her little boy as outgoing and friendly.
“Someone who can clear his tracheotomy tube or deal with his feeding tube needs to be with him at all times. It’s particularly hard on his sister Stephanie because it restricts the whole family.”
Joshua’s accident happened on what was a typical weekday morning for the family, when Lara was getting herself and the children ready for the day.
“We’d just moved into our new house and I’d never had a dishwasher before,” she explains.
“It was all a bit of a novelty. I put the powder in it, shut the door, put the top on the bottle and pushed it back on the bench so the kids couldn’t reach it from the floor.”
Then Lara went to the bathroom. She had been gone just one or two minutes when she heard Stephanie shouting that Joshua had had an accident. He was lying on the kitchen floor, next to his plastic ride-on toy motorcycle.
“At first I thought he’d fallen off,” Lara recalls, “then I saw that he was frothing at the mouth and there was blood dribbling from his lips.
“He had climbed up on his bike to reach the bottle of dishwashing powder, then he managed to get it open and drink from it as if it was a drink bottle.”
Not realising the extent of her small son’s injury, Lara’s first instinct was to drive Joshua to the doctor’s. But things changed rapidly as he began finding it difficult to breathe.
Lara ran down the road with Joshua cradled in her arms. Fortunately, a neighbour came to her aid, calling an ambulance and looking after Stephanie while Lara headed to the hospital with her son.
“I was crying and screaming for help,” she says.
Joshua spent three days in the hospital’s intensive care unit, in a medically induced coma. From that day on, the Wards’ family life revolved around trips to hospital and meetings with medical professionals to discuss Joshua’s treatment and care.
The tragedy has led Lara in new directions. She has completed a nursing paper by correspondence, and hopes to become a nurse so she can help other families. She is also the spokesperson for this year’s Safekids New Zealand National Awareness Campaign, which is focusing on poisoning prevention.
Safekids is the child injury prevention service of Starship Children’s Health, started 10 years ago by doctors who were concerned about the number of children admitted to hospital with preventable injuries. Lara shares Joshua’s story to urge families, communities and government agencies to work together to prevent child poisonings.
Almost half of all calls to the National Poisons Centre relate to kids and, each year, around 100 hospital admissions are children poisoned by common household products. one child a year dies from accidental poisoning.
In 2005, with Joshua’s case as the catalyst, Safekids called for a ban on the sale of caustic auto-dishwashing detergent. The ban was approved by the Government and will take effect on 1 July.
Lara and Joshua were guests of honour at the launch of Safekids’ 2006 to 2007 campaign to prevent childhood poisonings. The launch coincided with the launch of Australasia’s first poisoning prevention website. The interactive site was developed by the National Poisons Centre, one of 15 agencies supporting the Safekids Campaign.
Lara hopes talking about Joshua’s experience will help other families. Her message is simple: store all medicines, chemicals and cleaners out of children’s reach and sight.
“I’m not one for sitting back and throwing my hands up,” she says, “but our family life is forever changed. I woudn’t want this to happen to any other parent.”
By Dionne Christian
- For more information, visit www.safekids.org.nz or the National Poisons Centre website, www.poisons.co.nz
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