Real Life

Our toddler choked to death

Alison Downie-Boyte was about to pick up her son from daycare in Te Awamutu when she got the kind of phone call that no parent ever wants to receive.

“Kory’s choked, he’s not breathing, get here now,” were the chilling words Alison heard over her mobile. The rest of the journey was a blur but the sight of her son lying unconscious on the floor of the daycare centre after choking on a piece of apple will haunt her for the rest of her life.

“From the moment I saw him, I knew we were going to lose him,” Alison says.

Alison (29) and her husband Carl Boyte (31) could be forgiven for looking for someone to blame for their baby’s tragic death, but instead they are counting their blessings, thankful for the 14 precious months they had with their youngest son.

Described as a little boy who “lived every day like it was a year”, little Kory had just learned to walk the week before he died in Starship Hospital, having never regained consciousness.

Born with a tight knot in his umbilical cord, Alison says it’s lucky that Kory was not stillborn. Instead, he was a joyful baby who lit up everyone’s lives with his mischievous nature. “He’d get into everything and loved taking the TV remotes,” Alison says with a sad smile.

After having two sons, Keegan (10) and Ben (6), Alison and Carl were surprised when she fell pregnant again. They embraced the pregnancy but are now facing the test of accepting the huge gap in their lives that Kory has left behind.

“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy,” says Carl, a project manager in New Plymouth. “We’ll never adjust to it, but the support has helped.”

Loved by his whole family, little Kory was especially close to his grandma. “He followed his nana everywhere,” Alison smiles.

Kory had been spending lots of time with his nana because the family had been living with Alison’s parents in Te Awamutu while she completed an animal technology course. While his mum studied, Kory went to daycare, and it was there the event that was to have such a tragic result happened.

Although Kory had choked before, he had always managed to cough the object back up, but on that fatal day, despite daycare staff performing the Heimlich maneouver, the piece of peeled apple he had choked on could not be dislodged. CPR was performed until an ambulance arrived and he was kept on life support at Starship Hospital for four days until doctors told the family there was no hope left for their little boy.

Carl considers those days the worst, yet the most precious, of his life and is thankful he got to say goodbye and have a beer with his son.

“It was just something I felt a father and a son would get to do together. So I gave him a tiny sip,” Carl says. Alison says she just didn’t want to let him go. “I got to cuddle him and I didn’t share. I had to be told to go and have a shower so someone else could have a turn.”

At Kory’s funeral, mourners were asked not to wear black. They released balloons with songs The Rainbow Connection, Somewhere over The Rainbow, Tomorrow from the musical Annie, and Kory’s favourite song, Rock Star by Nickleback, playing throughout the service. A particularly moving moment for the family was a haka performed by the local primary school’s kapa haka group as Kory’s coffin was taken from the chapel.

Since her son’s death, Alison has developed an extreme fear of choking. “oy sister Debbie has a two-year-old and every time I see him eating, I say ‘Sit down!’ I tell people off if they’re not sitting in front of the high chair.”

The couple decided to share their story with Weekly readers to alert others to the dangers of choking. “It could save another child’s life,” Alison says.

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