Worth my weight in quarters

As I have already firmly established, I lacked a certain degree of common sense as a child.  And by that I mean that I had fewer street smarts at age ten than the average three-year-old.  My excess of academic aptitude had to get drawn off from somewhere else, and that somewhere else was my "how to operate in the real world" aptitude.  Those of you who know me well are fully aware that this imbalance is still in full effect.  But I digress.

One night when I was about nine or ten years old, I decided to heat coins in front of the fireplace.  They didn't actually get hot, just warm.  One quarter called out to me and I decided to put it in my mouth.  Why did I do that even though I was old enough to know better?  Please see the first paragraph.

Anyway, I made some strange movement and suddenly the quarter slid to the back of my throat.  My mom was nowhere within the immediate vicinity to Heimlich me out of the situation, so the only option to prevent asphyxiation was to swallow said quarter.  It.  Hurt.

I found myself marvelously not dead a few seconds later.  I tried swallowing and felt the quarter stuck in my throat, though I could still breathe normally.  Starting to worry, I ran upstairs and found my mother in the bathroom.  I didn't want to scare her, so I presented the issue as gently as I could.







Her mother senses kicked in and told her exactly what had happened.  We called a nurse hotline and found out that I was most likely not going to die.  The quarter had gone into my stomach and not my windpipe (which really would have killed me) and the quarter I thought I had stuck in my throat was just some scraping from the quarter's journey.

The take home message: when it comes to small objects, keep an eye on me as you would a toddler.