He could have let it go. Chalked it up as a fluke. Thanked his lucky stars and moved on.
But he knew the terror he felt that day, fear so intense that after the danger had passed he staggered outdoors and vomited, was nothing compared to what he would have felt if his daughter had died. And she almost did.
George DeCell is a stay-at-home dad from Fairfax, Vt. Five years ago, he was vacuuming his house and his nearly 1-year-old daughter, Sage Elizabeth, was toddling around behind him. Just an ordinary day, until he turned around and saw that his daughter wasn't following him anymore. She was on the floor grabbing at her throat and struggling to breathe.
"I was absolutely scared out of my mind," he said.
He grabbed her, opened her mouth and could see lodged in her throat the clear plastic safety cap he had removed from an electrical outlet to plug in the vacuum. He had placed it on a table's edge and his daughter had put it in her mouth and inhaled. The cap was like a stopper in a drain, blocking her airway.
Somehow, he doesn't know how, he didn't panic. He waited for her to stop fighting, for her body to relax, and then, he managed to dislodge it. "I swore to God that day that I would do something about this. Here I had bought something designed to protect my daughter and it ended up nearly killing her."
DeCell wrote to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (US CPSC)explaining what had happened and urging the board to issue a standard for electrical outlet safety plugs similar to the ones that regulate pacifiers. Pacifiers used to choke kids, too, until a federal law changed the way they were made.
The board rejected his request.
He then set about designing a bigger safety plug, which wouldn't fit in a child's mouth. While standard safety outlet plugs, which are sold and used everywhere, are 1 3/8 inches, his SafetyCaps measure 2 1/4 inches wide and include air holes, the way pacifiers do.
Such a simple thing, to make plugs a little bigger and add some air holes just in case a child does choke. A preventive measure, not even expensive.
DeCell then called hospitals around the country to get their input. "To date, " he says, "over 40 have written to the US CPSC requesting that they regulate [safety covers] so that they comply with pacifier anti-choking regulations."
He wrote to the CPSC a second time. But the commission again rejected his request on the basis that to date, other than his personal claim, there have been "no choking incidents associated with electric outlet safety caps."
We go to great lengths and expense to protect our children. We have child safety laws and seats and locks and latches and gates and guards and warnings everywhere. Still, every day, things that can hurt children get through our safety nets. Toys and jewelry with lead paint. Magnets that can be swallowed. Defective cribs and bassinets and baby carriers. And these are only the most current recalls.
The world is full of hazards. A device sold as a safety product, sold solely to protect children, should not be one of them.
I have an 18-month-old granddaughter. She puts everything in her mouth and the only reason she hasn't tried to swallow one of the little safety plugs, which are in all the outlets she can see, is that I don't vacuum when she's here.
But if Charlotte were my daughter? She probably would have grabbed the plug off the table many months ago and I'd have been like George DeCell, on the floor praying to God and scared out of my mind.
Maybe no other child will be hurt by these things. Maybe what happened to his daughter was a fluke. But maybe not. DeCell says, "If they can't fit it into their mouth they can't choke on it. It's that simple."
And so he works to get his message out. He sells his Safety Caps on his website, safetycaps.com, in a few stores in California, and, he says, he's been talking to Toys "R" Us. He's been endorsed by The Mommy Times and is mentioned in The Safe Baby, Expanded and Revised by Debra Smiley Holtzman.
It's slow going, he knows. And it's certainly not making him rich. He mortgaged his house to fund his invention. But he's okay with this.
The man is on a mission. He says he wants to be known as the guy who fought the system and won.
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