A young British mom has opened up about an embarrassing sticky situation — one that left her racing her baby to the ER, thinking he had a huge hole in his mouth.
Mom of three Becky Stiles, 24, told the Sun of her horror at seeing the large dark red “hole” in the roof of 10-month-old son Harvey’s mouth as she changed his diaper at home in Essex.
“I tried to touch it but he just screamed at me, so I made his dad rush over and see it,” Stiles recalled, saying it left her “shaking, sweating and holding back the tears.”
“We put a torch [flashlight] on it and his dad said, ‘What the hell is that?’” she recalled.
Her mother suggested they rush Harvey straight to a hospital, so they dropped their two eldest children off with their grandparents before driving 30 minutes to the nearest ER.
At the hospital, staff initially appeared ready to race Harvey to a specialist — until a nurse shone her pen flashlight into the tot’s mouth.
“After about 30 seconds of looking, she said, ‘That’s a sticker,'” recalled the mom, who initially contested the diagnosis and insisted it was a hole.
But the nurse simply “put her finger in his mouth and hooked it out,” Stiles admitted to the Sun, which said it happened earlier this week.
“I laughed, was shaking and so embarrassed … I told her I felt like a right prat,” she said, using UK slang for an idiot and saying she would have hugged the nurse had it not been forbidden by COVID-19 safety rules.
“She replied with, ‘Well, I’ve never fixed a cleft palate at A&E doors before,'” Stiles recalled of the nurse seeing the funny side.
“We all carried on laughing as we made the walk of shame back to the car,” she said, saying she then had to call all the family members who helped to report that “Harvey didn’t in fact have a hole in his mouth” but merely “had taken a liking to stickers.”