my granddaughter has a tube like piece in the back of her throat that sticks up when she opens her mouth and you look down her throat you can see. is that her esophagus or laranex or what.can it cause her harm

Anon, do you remember what the doctor called the tube when your granddaughter was a baby?

Could it be her eustachian tube? This is the tube that connects her middle ear to her throat. Or was it called something else?

Are the doctors at all concerned about it now? What does your granddaughter's pediatrician say now that she's 8?

The eustachian tube is responsibile for equalizing pressure inside our ears with that in the outside world. It's why, for instance, your ears "pop" when you're on an airplane. In children it's quite short, and in fact that shortness is one of the reasons so many children get ear infections and/or ear tubes. Here's a diagram of its path:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/images/ency/fullsize/19596.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/imagepages/19596.htm&usg=__MNZkZyD6OU6YFKQyIAw9Bdy4yBc=&h=320&w=400&sz=24&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=nVShKjRgAHsJZM:&tbnh=99&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Deustachian%2Btube%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:*:IE-SearchBox%26rlz%3D1I7GZEZ%26sa%3DG

You probably don't have to be worried about choking; that happens when a foreign object has actually blocked the upper airway.

Does your granddaughter still have her tonsils? Small pockets in the tonsils, called tonsil stones, can actually trap food particles until they rot, which could be responsible for her bad breath. They appear as small white nodules on her tonsils.

Here's a web forum discussion of tonsil stones in children:

http://tonsilstones.org/?p=13

Does any of this help? Please feel free to write back with more details and let us see if we can help with better answers.