There were flashes of color darting by and objects flying through the air. There were kids on chairs and even desks with fistfuls of chocolate. School was out for the day.
It’s hard to say the exact instant that liberating freedom evaporated. One minute I was enjoying a piece of cheery candy. The next minute I was staring at my feet and the bright red carpet.
My head began to explode with panic. I couldn’t breath. No matter how hard I tried to swallow, the piece of HI-C candy that had lodged itself in my throat wouldn’t move. I coughed. I gagged. My head began to spin.
The simple understanding that taking in a mouth full of air results in air inside my body caused even more panic when the tight gripping sensation in my throat wouldn’t go away. It’s like when you hold your breathe while driving over a bridge or by a graveyard. You begin to feel your lungs burn anticipating those last few seconds before you can take a dramatically deep breath.
But I got no deep breath. This wasn’t a game.
So many thoughts went through my 10-year-old head in just a few seconds. After my initial shock and attempt to force the candy downwards, I don’t remember feeling scared anymore. I felt rather normal as I walked across the room, through the chaos, and stood patiently behind my teacher. She was lecturing a classmate. We had been taught never to interrupt.
You would think these circumstances would have forced me to throw the rules out the window and jump around wildly waving my arms in the air. No. I tapped my teacher on the shoulder provoking a brief scolding as she turned her back to me once again. I tapped her a second time. This time she stopped and gave me a puzzled look, not because she knew something was wrong, but because I wasn’t the type of student to interrupt twice.
As the holding-your-breath-over-a-bridge feeling floated somewhere in the background, I felt like I was floating myself. Once my teacher realized that I was choking she grabbed me around my middle and squeezed hard. No breath. She tried the Heimlich maneuver again.
I imagine we looked rather comical, for my teacher was a little woman, no bigger than I.
The last thing I remember, as she squeezed for the third time, was the red shinny piece of candy flying out of my mouth. Moments later I was unconscious, yet the image of that candy shooting out of me and falling to the ground burned into my brain.
I woke up, pale with a hint of blue, to a crowd of worried teachers hovering over me. I remembered hearing that the ambulance would be there in 10 minutes. A lot of help that would be to us now. I got up, walked from the room, got on the bus and rode home, all while trying to figure out how to explain this one to my parents.
