On Nov. 30, 2001, we had salmon for dinner, and my son Gideon, then 7, swallowed a bone. How do I know this date so precisely? I have the insurance papers to prove it. When Gideon was still complaining about his throat at bedtime, we trekked over to the ER at Northern Virginia Community Hospital. There Gideon had his first experience with a nasopharyngeal scope, which goes up the nose and down the throat. There was no bone there, the doctor said. It must have gone on down, and it would be digested with no problem. We thought that was the end of it.

After letting Gideon sleep in the next morning, we set off for school. All of a sudden he started complaining vehemently: "My throat really hurts!" Hmmm, I thought. Maybe that doctor missed something.

So Gideon had a second throat scope that afternoon, at a pediatric otolaryngology practice near our home. This time the procedure was a bit more high-tech, as the scope had a camera attached to it. We were able to see Gideon's throat down to his larynx on a TV monitor.

Again, no bone was found. There was, however, a scratch on the back of his throat, a white line two or three inches long with swollen edges. It certainly didn't look like much of a problem. I remember the doctor's words very well: "Oh, that's what he's complaining about. And he'll keep on complaining about it for two or three more days. But then he'll be fine."

Here was the first missed opportunity to ask the vital question, "Where does your throat actually hurt, Gideon?" No one asked it.

I'm a pretty inquisitive mother. Some would say intrusive. It would have been characteristic for me to ask Gideon in a few days if his throat pain had gone away, but I didn't. It wasn't that I forgot about it; I made a deliberate choice.

Gideon hadn't said another word about his throat since that second doctor visit. The obvious explanation was that the pain had gone away, as the doctor had said it would. Why remind Gideon of the discomfort of having his throat scoped twice in two days?

So I kept quiet. The results of my poor decision led me to formulate one of the biggest lessons of this whole sorry affair: Always ask the obvious question.

Weeks went by. We were well into 2002 when Gideon started saying, "My throat really hurts."

Alert readers will notice that these were the exact words he had used earlier. Did that thought occur to me? No. So much time had passed that any connection in my mind with the fish bone incident had been lost.

Foolishly, I didn't ask him where his throat hurt. I had no idea that he had developed a second area of pain, down at the base of his neck, by the day after the fish bone incident. This had been what he was talking about when he complained then. The pain from the scratch, up in his actual throat, had gone away but this lower pain had not. He had assumed that this lower pain would also go away and had finally started complaining when it didn't.

Meanwhile, I assumed that he was merely talking about a normal sore throat, even though he had never had any throat problems before. (Note all of the assumptions.)   

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