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SALT LAKE CITY — The barbecued chicken was probably the best Peter Richards ever tasted — a savory feast prepared by his wife Lindsey Richards that even the kids were scarfing down. He joked with Greta, then 3, that if she didn't eat the three cutlets she'd snagged, he would.
She gave him the third piece and he did exactly that, but as he swallowed it, he had the feeling he hadn't chewed it enough. Only it felt more painful than that. Maybe it was a bone sliver, he thought, so he Googled how to get that to dislodge.
Eat a slice of bread. Swallow a banana. Nothing helped. Swallowing hurt enough that it kept waking him all night.
He told Deseret News the story a year after it happened.
In the morning, Richards, who runs an energy consulting firm and lives in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, dropped the kids at school, then saw his doctor, who couldn't find a reason for his pain and sent him to the emergency room for scans.
The culprit was clearly visible on X-ray: A thin piece of wire was lodged in his throat. It was a bristle from a metal brush used to clean the barbecue grill.
Richards would soon learn that his journey — including three surgeries in four days and a just-in-case feeding tube — isn't that uncommon. A study in the journal Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery found that roughly 1,700 people visited an emergency room for just such an injury between 2002 and 2014. It's believed likely that more bristles are swallowed but pass without causing harm. And sometimes people can retrieve it themselves.
Most of the injuries are to the mouth or throat. But the rigid metal bristles can actually perforate nearly any part of the digestive tract and cause life-threatening injuries, including bowel obstructions, perforations and infections.
Dr. Meghan Martin, a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, told Today about a case she treated: a little boy who was complaining of excruciating pain in his ear. It took several examinations by different doctors before it was discovered he had a piece of wire from a grill brush lodged so deeply into his tonsil tissue that an exam didn't show it. That required a scan.
The symptoms may not even show up for a few days, well after a meal cooked on the grill is no longer top of mind as a potential source of misery.
Some experts suggest not using grill brushes; others say at the very least take great care: Clean the grill often so there's no buildup and check after to be sure that there's no bristle left behind. The other bit of advice is to be sure that you get rid of a grill brush if it shows any signs of wear.
As for Richards, it was in a third surgery using live X-rays as they went that the bristle was successfully removed. The surgeon told him he'd had a similar case where the patient's esophagus was quite damaged.
After his operations, Richards was on a liquid diet, then graduated to soft foods. He's now recovered well. But the Richards family doesn't use a wire brush these days to clean their grill. "Half an onion or potato works amazingly well," he said. A pumice stone leaves a little powder behind that can be wiped off. Recently, he's used a bamboo paddle to scrape the grill.
They all beat surgery, pain and a hospital bill.
