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One Friday in October, 2005 my husband Forrest and I were attending a Bar-B-Q honoring hospice volunteers when he complained of something scratching his throat. That scratch, which he attributed to a bit of charred meat, nearly cost him his life.
After washing it down with a large amount of soda, Forrest commenced eating and enjoying the companionship of fellow volunteers. By Sunday things started to get a bit scary. We went to church that evening and people noticed that things just did not seem right. He was losing his voice, his throat was sore and he was flushed with fever. Figuring it was probably the onset of a nasty bug, I convinced him to go to work early and be checked out by a doctor. He is an X-Ray tech who has worked the night shift for 30 years. For once he listened to me.

The next time I heard from him, about 6 Monday morning, he could barely speak and had been admitted for observation. Shortly after that he went into respiratory failure, had a breathing tube in and placed on a ventilator in the intensive care unit.
A CAT scan had reveled what doctors believed was an artifact (something wrong with the film itself)showing a slash on the left side of his throat, just below the carotid artery. He was taken to surgery but the object could not be found with the scope (tube) and they felt if something was there it had passed. Another CAT scan showed that there was still something there and the object was metallic in nature.
Wednesday he was taken to surgery again where surgeons put in a tracheotomy so he could breath without the ventilator and slice his neck to drain a large and growing abscess (8 centimeters). They also discovered two 3 centimeter long steel bristles from a a bar-b-q cleaning brush, one behind the other so only one showed up on film.
Surgeons told me later that if they had waited two more hours they would have had to open his chest and I had come extremely close to losing him.
Forrest spent 12 days in the intensive care unit most with the tracheotomy still in place. He was tube fed, had I.V.s and various other tubes attached to him. He also went into congestive heart failure as a result of all the trauma his body endured.
After he got cranky enough and started to demand mashed potatoes and gravy it was decided he was well enough to go home. It had been determined that the bristles were on the grill when the hamburger patty was slapped on top of them and they cooked into the meat. No one saw them or thought to look for them, which makes me want to tell everyone this story, especially since the summer grilling season has arrived.
While talking to a nurse before a recent medical procedure, she related a similar story involving a female patient.This woman also had ingested steel brush bristles and became deathly ill. I am sure this is a risk few people are aware of and I hope everyone reading this will spread the word. The safest way to clean a grill is with half a warm onion. It removes all the sludge and it smells good after cleaning.

Learn more about this author, Shirley Gooding.
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