January 19th, 2022 was one of the scariest days of my life. My office was still on coronavirus lockdown, so our morning stand-up was happening over Slack. I was in my kitchen, in full work-brain mode, taking my turn and talking through what I’d done the day before and what I planned to do next. All the kids were upstairs. Then I heard someone yelling down, “Dad!” It was loud and panicked, and I could tell it was Daphne. I noticed immediately that her voice had an urgency beyond normal kid stuff, but I didn’t fully trust my instincts and I kept talking on the Slack call anyway.
A moment later Daphne came downstairs again and said, “Dad,” and this time I could see her face. She had this wild look in her eyes that made everything snap into focus. Right behind her was Max, doing that universal gesture—hands at his throat—showing he was choking. I didn’t hesitate anymore. I ran off the call without even properly ending it and started doing the Heimlich maneuver.
Max is a big kid, and it took a huge amount of physical effort. I tried again and again—many attempts—and it wasn’t working fast enough. I could feel myself getting frustrated and completely freaked out at the same time. Finally I shifted tactics: I kind of threw him over my shoulder so his head was pointing downward, and I did a Heimlich-like thrust using my shoulder, trying to let gravity help too. In those critical moments, that combination finally worked.
Max coughed something out into a bloody sputum pile: a water bottle cap. After that, I held him and we both cried. When things calmed down a little, I went back to Slack and told my coworkers, “I’m sorry, guys, everything is fine, but I’ve got to go,” and then I hung up. I still wonder what it was like on their end, because they must have heard at least some of what happened.
Afterward, Max and I spent time decompressing, and then I took everyone out to a movie as a kind of celebration of life. Max explained how it happened: he had a water bottle with the cap on, and he was squeezing it and pointing it at his face when the cap suddenly ejected straight into the back of his throat.
Since that day, we’ve treated January 19th as “Max’s day” and do something small and special to mark it. And I’ve also developed this hyperfixation about bottle caps—anywhere we go in public, I’m constantly bending down to pick up discarded plastic water bottle caps when I see them.