A schoolboy in Scotland suffered a collapsed lung after choking on a piece of popcorn.
Two-year-old, Jordy Gordon from Fort William, Scotland, was just two years old when he choked on the snack and unknowingly inhaled a kernel, which obstructed his airways.
His mum took him to the hospital when he couldn’t stop coughing, wrongly suspecting he had a chest infection.
But scans revealed the tiny piece of popcorn had caused one of Jordy’s lungs to completely collapse and he was kept in for treatment.
But a follow-up scan to check his lung function revealed he had a potentially-fatal heart condition where his pulmonary veins were in the wrong place.
Jordy wasn’t getting enough oxygen and without open-heart surgery could “drop dead” at any moment, doctors warned.
His mum Shona Macgillivray, 35, fears the heart condition would never have been discovered if Jordy hadn’t inhaled the snack.
The early years practitioner, from Scotland, said: “I now think of that popcorn as both a blessing and a curse, as it showed us what was wrong.”
Shona added: “We spoke to the doctors who told us that loads of things can go wrong during surgery, but if he didn’t have it he could just drop dead at some point maybe in his late teens or early twenties.”
Doctors said there was a chance he might not survive the operation or be left disabled by it, but he went under the knife in July 2016.
The 12-hour surgery at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow saw doctors cut through his chest to reposition his pulmonary veins.
Shona said: “It was the worst day of my life. It was awful – I walked in, burst into tears, and then walked back out again.
“It was like he was comatose and wasn’t really aware of what was going on.”
Six days after he was admitted for his surgery, Jordy came home to his mum, dad and older brother Rhys, now 10, after making a full recovery.
