Mom's gut instinct may have saved son's life

AUSTIN, Texas (WPVI) -- A Texas mom may have saved her son's life with some chance TV viewing, and by following her instinct.

Six-year-old Wyatt Llarena was eating sunflower seeds with teammates during a baseball game last week, when he began choking on some.

He coughed out the seeds - or so it seemed. Wyatt still had a cough that his mother, Lizzy, didn't think was quite right.

His dad said it sounded like he had bronchitis.

Lizzy had recently seen a story about a 20-year-old man in Leander, Texas who died after choking on a chicken bone. Doctors couldn't find that bone in time.

So the next morning, when the cough hadn't gone away, Lizzy took Wyatt to the ER.

"Before I even opened my eyes, I heard him cough just once and it sounded weird," she says. "I knew that I needed to act quickly."

"I wasn't going to leave without getting an answer," recalls Lizzy.

And a camera on an endoscope proved her gut feeling about trouble was right.

"This is a photo of his trachea, with a sunflower seed lodged in it," she says.

Wyatt underwent emergency surgery to remove the seed. He's okay now and mom is happy she was so persistent.