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