Girl inhales boutonniere pin, goes to prom anyway, has surgery the next day
Have we finally pinned down the weirdest prom story of 2016?
On the party bus on the way to prom last week, Massachusetts teen Kathleen Garvey tried to readjust the boutonniere on her boyfriend Colin Emerson’s tuxedo lapel, according to WHDH in Boston.
As many of us have done, Kathleen held the tiny boutonniere pin her mouth as she struggled with the flower.
But then Colin made her laugh.
Kathleen inhaled.
And the pin disappeared.
“Oh my God, did you swallow it?” Colin asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“He made some kind of joke, I laughed and it went down my throat and I immediately started coughing,” the Wellesley High senior told CBS Boston. “It was a small black pin so we just assumed worst case scenario it went down.”
She wasn’t in any pain, so she went to prom.
But what happened on the party bus didn’t stay on the party bus. News of the pin-tastrophe spread at the dance via Snapchat and other social media apps, according to The Swellesley Report blog.
Security at the prom venue “threatened to take Garvey straight to the hospital,” the blog reports. “Garvey called her parents from prom and convinced them to let her stay, as neither they nor she could believe she had really inhaled the object.
“Garvey had a great time at the dinner and dance, went to an after-party, slept over at a friend’s house and got breakfast the next morning.”
The next day she and her mom went to the hospital fully expecting doctors to find nothing wrong. Instead, an X-ray showed the corsage pin stuck in her bronchial tubes.
“It went down my throat, down my trachea and in my bronchial tube right before my lung,” Kathleen told CBS Boston.
Doctors were shocked that with all the dancing she did at prom the pin “didn’t puncture anything or scrape anything on the way down,” said Kathleen, who graduates this week.
It took doctors 45 minutes in surgery to fish out the pin through her throat.
A grateful Kathleen said she learned a valuable lesson. “I just hope we learn not to take sharp things in our mouths after this,” she told CBS.
But The Swellesly Report had the last word.
“After graduating from Wellesley High this coming Friday, Garvey will move on to Providence College to study Biology,” noted the blog.
“Though we wonder if the Prom Pin incident might inspire her to consider studying Anatomy instead.”
This story was originally published May 31, 2016 at 4:35 PM with the headline "Girl inhales boutonniere pin, goes to prom anyway, has surgery the next day."