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> like intubation, which is the process of pulling or pushing a tube down a patient's esophagus.

Hopefully you are intubating a patient’s trachea and not not the esophagus.

Does esophageal intubation happen much? I was intubated a month ago due to non-COVID respiratory failure. I also ended up getting pneumonia but no one knows when I got it. If that happened to me would my medical team have told me? Speaking generally obviously since you don’t know my case of course.

> If that happened to me would my medical team have told me?

I don't know where you are. In England healthcare professionals and their organisations have a statutory "Duty of Candour". They have to tell you when something went wrong, why it went wrong, what they're going to try to do to fix it for you, and what they're doing to prevent it happening again in future.

https://www.cqc.org.uk/sites/default/files/Duty-of-Candour-2...

In general esophageal intubation results in death. The patient is not getting oxygen, and so they die. I believe esophageal intubation gets reported to the Board of Medicine and is a really big deal for the hospital and doctor involved.

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