Doctors Pull Feather From 7-Month-Old’s Neck

Like any new parents, Aaron Whittington and his wife were worried when their 7-month-old daughter started acting strange.

The Whittington’s couldn’t figure out what was bothering their baby girl and her increasing discomfort stumped them until they noticed something extremely odd on the side of her face.”We were just pretty much in disbelief,” Mya’s dad, Aaron Whittington, 26, told ABCNews.com. “I was at work and my wife noticed that the left side of her neck had started to swell, and she called me at work and asked if we should take her to the emergency room,” Whittington said.

Mya’s pediatrician told the shocked parents that their daughter likely inhaled or tried to swallow a feather, causing it to become lodged in her throat. That’s when Mya’s body “just being crazy, just started to reject it and force it out the side of her neck,” according to her dad.”[The pediatrician] threw on gloves and she pulled out a 2-inch feather and she’s like, ‘It’s a feather.’ And we’re like, ‘What do you mean it’s a feather?’ And she showed us,” Whittington said, still in disbelief.

“As far as how the feather got into the side of the neck, our doctor says we’ll probably never really know,” he said. “But her best guess is that she either inhaled it or tried swallowing it and it got lodged in the throat somewhere, and the body, just being crazy, just started to reject it and force it out the side of her neck.”

Thankfully, the little girl’s bizarre blemish healed on its own and never caused her further discomfort. Yet that didn’t stop her story from spreading worldwide when it happened in 2012. “We’ve been extremely, extremely surprised,” Aaron Whittington said to ABCNews.com. “We’ve gotten stories in Kenya, India, the U.K. It’s really crazy.”