The billboard reads: "Child swallows toy. Gets cool X-Ray for show and tell. Great emergency care changes the story. Sparrow."I was walking home from work one day and I saw the above billboard. It almost instantly struck me as innapropriate. At first I thought maybe I was just acting on some inbred-American knee jerk reaction to complain about everything. The more I thought it about it though, especially from a parents perspective, the billboard seemed callous. A child swallowing, or especially, chocking on a toy strikes me as a poor subject to make light of especially has a health care facility. If my child had been choking on a toy, and was then saved by a medical team, I would not think "Well at least we got this cool X-Ray." And a point my friend Dave brought up, I wouldn't want a kid to see the billboard and think "If I choke on my toy I can get a cool X-Ray." Were I actually a parent maybe I would think that children and the subjects surrounding them don't need to be treated so delicately, but I'm not a parent, and this billboard frustrates me. Maybe to hospital personnel, who have seen and experienced it all, these things don't seem that dramatic, but to the general public, I think those medical emergencies are still frightening.
