Preparing for the Miracle

It’s the same as all the other stories you hear: It all happened so fast, We were all right there when it happened, We thought we had taken the right precautions... but he drowned anyway. We had been swimming all morning. We intended to get the kids tired out so that we could work on cleaning the house. My parents were coming home from California that night. They had been gone for over a year and my family had been living in their empty house for the last three weeks. My family. The one with 6 little kids. It needed cleaned badly! So we were playing hard, getting the kids wore out so we could get quality naps. Lunchtime came around and that’s when our "proper precautions" started to wear thin. Adults and kids started going in and out of the house: Can you get the mustard, We need more cups, I need to go potty! Life Jackets and Swimmies came off so as not to drip too much water through the house, and there was such a hunger need that no one was put in charge of getting them back on again. I had no idea that he wasn’t in his life jacket. When I saw the top of his little head in the water I remember thinking, “I’m so glad we got that new little jacket! He is swimming so well with it on!” It was so fast. We were all right there. 15 feet away. I had thought we had the right precautions in place. But he drowned anyway. 

     The three year old saw him first. He knew something was wrong and started to drag him to the steps. There his big sister, who is five, grabbed him. They weren’t yelling or screaming, just dragging him in. I saw them next, and I remember thinking that’s not what it looks like. It can’t possibly be … I started yelling at my husband to get him out. He ran over and the five year old handed him over to Dad. I remember yelling the most intense prayer of my life, “Oh God, NO! Not my Ammie! Please, please not my Ammie!” Over and over again. His body was limp and blue. His eyes were glazed over. No one ever told me about how his eyes would look. His body looked so small, like some horrid rubber doll hanging limp in his father’s arms. When I ran up to get him, he smelled like vomit. Of course Dad handed him to me. I had had the most training. I knew we had to start CPR immediately. But this was so different than training. He was so small. How do I do compressions on a chest this small? His entire chest fit in my two hands.

     Somewhere away from the chaos going on in my head, I heard my husband telling his mom to get all the rest of the kids in the house. That made sense, we didn’t want them in the way. And someone yelled to call for 911. I started compressions. Immediately there was water, so much water. Water came out his nose and his mouth. He was completely full of water. I kept going, compressions, rescue breath, compressions. The water stopped. At some point I looked up and my husband was standing there watching, and I remember yelling at him, “Call 911!!” He told me his phone was so old it was taking a minute to bring up the phone app. Stupid phone! Compressions, rescue breath, compressions! I started to hear Ammie’s little voice. Little sighs that sounded just like him, but weren’t really him. I remember the CPR instructor talking about that. Patients can start making vocal sounds while you are performing CPR, but it’s just the air going through their cords. I hadn’t thought about how the sounds he would make would be made in his voice. It sounded just like him. I remember thinking it was going to be the last time I would hear his little voice. Don’t stop! Compressions, rescue breath, compressions! I started to notice he was changing color. He wasn’t so blue, his lips were starting to pink up. That’s when I realized my knees were burning on the concrete. If I was going to be able to keep going, I had to get off the patio. I picked him up and ran inside. I started CPR again, but I started to notice his pink color spreading. His heart had started again. I did a couple more rescue breaths and his chest started to rise and fall on it’s own. He was breathing! The 911 operator told us to roll him on his side so that if he starts to vomit he wouldn’t aspirate it. Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that. It wasn’t long before the first fireman arrived. He came in and started listening to Ammie’s lungs with his stethoscope. He still had water in his lungs, so we tried to rouse him. That’s when he vomited. Another big batch of water. It was a good sign, but he still wouldn’t rouse. He was just so tired. Another couple of minutes and the EMTs got there. They ran in and the female EMT grabbed him and headed to the ambulance. I looked at my husband and told him to bring clothes because I was still in my swimming suit, and we left. He vomited one more time in the ambulance, and that seemed to clear his lungs. By the time we got to the hospital, the doctors said his lungs sounded clear. Chest x-rays showed that his lungs looked good. He responded to pain, and his reflexes were good, we just couldn’t rouse him. He was so exhausted.

     They said he needed to be kept under observation for the night to be sure that he didn’t have any complications, but the hospital didn’t have a pediatric intensive care unit. So they decided to fly him to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where he would receive the best care. I couldn’t believe how fast they had the helicopter team there to take him away. I wanted to go with them. But they were concerned that the seat belts wouldn’t fit around my 39 week pregnant belly. And so we got him prepped in the seat belt on the gurney, and they took him. They said it would be a 12 minute flight to CHOP. It took us almost two hours to drive. It was the hardest moment for me to watch him roll down the hallway heading to the helicopter. I was completely sick that I couldn’t be with him. 

     When we got to CHOP, a nurse was sitting with him, rocking him. He was asleep, but they informed us that he woke when he got off the helicopter, and his lungs are working well. He screamed in his amazingly high pitched screams and was calling for his dad! They were actually wondering if those high pitched screams were normal for him. They also asked about a red mark that had developed by his eye. He had had a mosquito bite that developed petechiae (those little red spots that can speckle your face from intense vomiting) from the pressure of CPR.  But that was it. His vitals were normal, his heart was normal, he was reacting as he should. He was our little boy, alive and well. Truly, he was a miracle to us. 

     The stress of the day did start some minor contractions for me that night, but with some rest they went away. They kept us overnight for observation, but it was clear that by the next morning he was going to be just fine. He was eating, drinking, and playing with the cool new hospital toys - which was a definite benefit of being in a pediatric unit. Our life, it seemed was going to be able to return to normal, though it would never be the same. I will forever look at him a little differently. I will appreciate his smile and laughter, even his high pitched screams, so much more. 

So why is this story important? It started out the same as all the other stories you hear, but our miracle ending was not the result of luck or of an amazingly fast ambulance team, but of training. I received my Wilderness First Responder training as part of my undergraduate degree in Recreation Management. As part of that certification, and recertifications, you are presented with many practice scenarios that require you to work through how to care for a patient. You discuss what the patient will look like, how they will act, even the panic or fear of the people around the patient. Working through these scenarios prepares you to act under pressure. I have also served on a search and rescue team that also did training exercises on how to handle stressful situations. With that team, I received the Red Cross Healthcare Provider CPR certification. It was in this higher level CPR certification where I learned about what drowning patients will look like, smell like, sound like. Some how, knowing these things, being prepared for them made me feel more competent, even capable to do what seemed impossible: perform CPR on my own son. 

 

So be trained. Get as much training as possible. Get an advanced CPR certification. The little bit of extra time and money may be the difference of being able to act, and freezing under pressure. I decided because of this experience that I have to continue my first responder training. There is still so much that I should learn! I am so grateful for the courses and instructors that I have had thus far that gave me the ability to not panic, freeze, or give up too soon, but to do what was needed to save my son’s life. 

As an epilogue to the story; As we walked in the front door of our house, Ammie ran in, picked up his life jacket and asked to go in the pool. “Yes!" we said. We went straight into the pool, got the other kids, and made new happy memories of the family playing together in the water. We will be more diligent about our children in their life preservers, but fear will not drive us to abandon activities that provide bonding and a lifetime of fun.

Work hard, play daily, sleep well, be safe. But above all, love every moment of this life.






For Dad's version of the story (including pictures) visit: http://trailheadfamily.blogspot.com/2016/09/whats-worst-that-can-happen.html 

What's the Worst That Can Happen

We do a lot of crazy traveling with our family.  My wife and I are proud of the fact that we don't let fear stop us from bringing our kids along on any adventure that pops into our minds.  We do hard things, that is just what it means to be part of our family.  And yes, sometimes when someone says that we are crazy, I am guilty of responding with the phrase "What's the Worst That Can Happen".

On August 14th we were sitting around my in-laws pool, impatiently waiting for my wife to go into labor.  This was our second attempt at trying to have a home birth while visiting family on vacation.  My in-laws had been away serving a mission for our church but were returning home that evening just in time to meet our seventh child.  This is probably an excessive build up to the story since you all knew the story as soon as I said "we were sitting around the pool", but I digress.

The kids had been playing and having a blast, but we were all hungry.  We got out of the pool to make sandwiches and my mom, who lives just down the street from my in-laws, helped to cycle the kids through the bathroom.  Using the bathroom before lunch is actually quite a chore with six kids.  After using the toilet a few of the children, specifically the 5 year old, 3 year old, and 2 year old, got back into the pool and were playing on the steps.  There are two things I want to point out here so you don't immediately think that we are horrible parents 1) there were three adults (me, my wife, and my mom) all standing 15-20 feet away making sandwiches, and 2) we always keep our little kids in life jackets when they are playing near the pool.

Ok, so number two was wrong in this case.  We all thought the two year old was in a life jacket, but it hadn't gotten put back on after he made the trip to the bathroom, and for some reason he got back in the water without asking for it.  My wife had seen that he was in the pool, his head was sticking up out of the water as he was laughing with his siblings, but she didn't see that the life jacket was missing.  Three adults standing 15 feet away making sandwiches and none of us saw that the two year old had gotten back in the pool without his life jacket.

The Worst 5 Minutes of my life
Our three year old son was the first one to notice that there was a problem.  His 2 year old little brother had at some point moved off the step and went under the water.  We don't know exactly what happened at this point.  The three year old pulled his brother to the side of the pool where their older sister lifted him out of the water.  Nobody remembers what was said, but at that instant all three adults turned and saw my daughter holding this small lifeless blue body limp across her arms.

I ran over and grabbed him.  I can't remember if he felt cold or not, but he was completely blue.  His eyes were glossed over and his body was limp.  The more we think about this event the more it reminds us of when you pull a dead frog out of the pool skimmer.  But this wasn't a frog it was my son.  I don't know if I can officially say that he was dead, but his heart had stopped and he wasn't breathing.  He looked dead.

My first instinct was to just get everyone away.  This way the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to our family and I didn't want anyone there to see it.  I didn't want my wife to have to see him.  She was due to have a baby at any minute, and couldn't handle seeing her dead son hanging there in my arms.

You should know that this is actually taking more time for you to read than it took for me to live this experience.  The above paragraph actually all happened within probably 3-5 seconds of time.  My panic lead to the only logical conclusion, I handed my son to my wife.  She says she would have punched me had I done anything different, and rightfully so.  To me he was dead, to my wife he was her child needing to be saved.  She immediately began performing CPR, massaging his heart with her thumbs and between rescue breath repeating "not my Ammie, not my Ammie".  At the same time she was yelling at me to call 911, which I was fumbling to do with my shaking fingers.

Turning Point
This is the point where the story turns for the better.  It took about five minutes from the time my wife started CPR until my son began to get the first bit of color back into his lips.  This was how she knew that his heart had started back up again.  I have no idea how this works so to me I just chalk it up to being a miracle.  She rubbed his chest and that limp body, whom I perceived as dead, became my son again.

All of this had been happening on the burning hot concrete patio, and at this point my wife lifted him up and moved him inside the house.  A couple more rescue breaths and he spewed water on the dining room floor.  His lungs must have been completely filled because there was a lot of water.  After the water came out we saw the first sign of movement as his check began to move, just slightly, but he was breathing.  To me it was like seeing a ghost.  My son was dead, but now here he was lying on the ground, flush and unconscious but no longer blue.  He looked like a person again.

According to my phone it took eight minutes from when I first dialed 911 until the fire chief showed up at our house.  After assessing the situation he began working to get the rest of the water out of my son's lungs.  A few minutes later the ambulance arrived and my 11 year old directed the EMTs to our location.  It seems like a blink of the eye and they were gone with my wife yelling for me to grab her some clothes and meet her at the hospital.  They were gone.

I took a few minutes to calm down the rest of the kids, and my mom, while I packed some things to take with me to the hospital.  By the time I arrived my son was stable.  The doctors insisted that he be flown down to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) for further observation, but reassured us that he was going to be ok.  The rest of the water had come out of his lungs during the ambulance ride, but they didn't have the facilities to keep him under watch all night.  They said it would take him 13 minutes to fly to Philadelphia by helicopter, much shorter than our two hours in traffic.  This was one of the hardest points for my wife as she hadn't left his side the whole time, but due to her huge belly couldn't ride along in the helicopter.  They said I couldn't go due to "weight constraints", but I think they just realized that I needed to stay with my wife.

When we finally made it to the hospital in Philadelphia he was asleep in his room.  He was asleep, not unconscious, just asleep.  He had apparently woken up in the helicopter and spent much of the ride yelling for "daddy".  Now he was just tired.  It was a rough day for all of us, and his little body needed to sleep.


There is a lot more about that we could talk about with this story (for example how the stress started my wife into labor) but the most important things is that he lived with no signs of brain damage.  The nurse said that as long as the heart starts back up within 15 minutes you avoid permanent problems.  We don't know for sure how long he was underwater, but we are guessing no more than 3 minutes.  This means that my wife got his heart started after he had been down for around 9 minutes.  If nothing would have been done until the fire chief arrived, and if it took him about the same amount of time as it took my wife, then my son would have been down for approximately 3+8+5=16 minutes.  I don't know what the consequence would have been of those few extra minutes, but to me, my wife saved his life.  Because of her, he is the same child that he was at the start of the summer.  I have always loved my wife, and I have always known that she is an incredible woman, but I can't even express the way I feel for her after this incident.  She is amazing.

What is the moral of this story
1) Bad things can happen even when you are just visiting family, and may actually be more likely.  There are two things that I believe caused this incident.  First, we were out of our normal routine.  When traveling you break your routine and as a result risk skipping some important part of your normal parenting process.  When traveling you will inevitably have to change some of your routines, and yes this increases the odds of something horrible happening; but breaking your routine is also what makes traveling beneficial.  You only grow as a person when you try new things, which means you have to break your routine.  So I would argue, it's worth the risk.

Secondly, accidents happen when you get too comfortable.  We had lived with my in-laws for almost two years, albeit back before we brought a miniature basketball team along with us.  Their house felt like home to us, and we were quickly lulled into believing that everything was normal.  It felt like home, so we turned off our high alert system.  Unfortunately this wasn't our normal home routine, we don't even have a pool at home, so we needed to remember that this was not an environment that the kids were used to.

2) I had taken CPR multiple times through the years but it didn't help because I panicked.  I tell people that this was the most worthless I have ever felt as a parent.  My child needed me more than ever before and I couldn't do anything.  Fortunately, I did the most important thing correctly which was to hand my son over to my wife.

In preparation for our crazy life together my wife had gotten her undergraduate degree in Outdoor Recreation, and part of her training involved receiving her Wilderness First Responder (WFR) certification.  She has kept this up over the years, presumably because the recertification is so much cheaper than the initial training, but really because it gives her the confidence she needs to save us a ton of emergency room visits.  When we lived in Texas my wife was on the Search and Rescue team where she received addition training on how to stay calm during intense situations.  My wife is naturally just an amazing woman, but she also had the training necessary to mediate this situation.

We believe that everyone should try new experiences.  Get yourself out of your comfort zone.  That said, when the worst happens the more training you have the better.  The WFR course is designed to help you "Be Prepared for The Unexpected".  The Unexpected can happen whether you are on a week long kayak trip, or just visiting your in-laws.  You will feel more confident to try new things, and be better prepared, if you take the time to receive training.

3) We were only kept in the hospital for 24 hours before we were sent home.  And you can probably guess the first thing my son wanted to do when we got back to my in-laws house; he wanted to go in the pool.  We walked into the house, he grabbed the life jacket, and told us he wanted to go swimming.  So what did we do... we took him swimming.  Actually my wife took him swimming and I drove over to my parents house to get the rest of the kids so we could all go swimming together.

Here is the important point: Bad Things Will Happen.  This may have been the worst thing that has happened to us while traveling with our kids, but it definitely isn't the first time that something bad has happened.  I mean we have survived some massive cuts, burns, cacti, and oh yeah having a premature baby while on a camping trip.  And all of these past experiences have taught us that you can't completely prevent horrible things from happening, but you can learn from the experiences. We did not want the lesson to be that our kids should stay away from the water, this would be a negative consequence of the experience and would limit the future fun we could have as a family.

I actually don't know what the big take away is going to be for our kids related to this experience, but I do know that it will make our family stronger.  I also know that when I hold my kids now I do it a little differently and I appreciate every moment with them a little bit more.  Things will never be completely the same, but we aren't going to stop doing amazing things together as a family.

 P.S.  And here is the best part.  Less than a week after my son drowned in the pool he was able to play with his new baby sister.  This is what a miracle looks like.

For mom's side of the story read: Preparing for the Miracle