We were going on vacation today. Literally, as we sat in the driveway prepared to drive off, my older daughter started shouting “Look at Bug! She’s choking! (“Bug” is her nickname for our fifteen month old baby”)
I turn around, and she’s just not choking, her eyes are rolling up in the back of her head, and she’s turning purple. She’s not breathing at all.
My wife is screaming, and I’m screaming and by the time I unbuckle my seatbelt, get out of the car, and open up the back door, Bug is completely limp and darkening by the second.
I know that what I do next is the wrong thing, and I know I don’t have time for mistakes, but I stick my finger down Bug’s throat and scoop, hard. I find nothing.
“Do something!” My wife yells.
I start taking Bug out of her carseat, and tell my wife to call “911.”
“What’s the number,” she asks?
“911!”
I put my hand under Bug’s chest and flip her over. I whack her hard on the back, three or four times. Nothing.
My wife hands me the phone.
I say my address twice and tell them my baby is choking to death. She is purple and unconscious and they need to send the ambulance now.
I kneel on the pavement and hold my limp little girl, while the 911 lady asks me questions that I already know the answers to:
“Is she conscious?” NO.
“Is she getting any air?” No. She is limp and purple.
“Is she moving at all?”
They tell me to hit her on the back again, four times, hard, and to get her head low.
Nothing happens.
I want to put the phone down and get up and walk away. They tell me to try it again.
I do, but I’m thinking about the pocketknife on my keychain. I’ve only seen this on tv, but my little girl needs air. We are at the point in time when I am going to use that knife and attempt to perform a trackeotomy so my daughter can breathe. I have no idea how to do this, will botch it and my daughter will die, if she’s not dead already. Two minutes of stillness, the purple color tells me it doesn’t matter and everything has changed.
The EMT is saying something, asking me if she’s breathing, telling me how good I am doing, telling me the ambulance is on the way, and that she wants me to stay on the phone. She’s managing me, so I don’t do anything stupid, and she’s doing a good job, a great job. I hear the sirens and I tell my wife to run up the driveway and wave them in since our drive is hidden.
The Baby is still limp, still purple, still not breathing.
And it happened just like this.
“Anything,” I said. It wasn’t really a prayer, because I was open to all takers, and I didn’t expect to be heard, but I wanted it on the fucking record, because you never know, do you?
And Bug stirred and took a breath. A real ragged shallow tiny and pitiful thing, but a breath.
“She just breathed” I say into the phone.
“Is her color getting better?”
“Yes.”
And very weakly she continued to breathe. It wasn’t much, but she was doing it, and she whimpered.
The EMTs arrived and took her and worked on her in the ambulance, and I just sat there in the driveway. They drove away with my wife in the ambulance and I just sat there in the driveway.
I remembered my other daughter. At some point I had yelled at her to sit in the van, and that’s what she was doing. The key was in the ignition and the open door was making the car go “ding. ding. ding.”
I get in the car and turn on the ignition. “Honey?” I say to her. She is sitting very still.
“Yes, daddy?”
“I think you’re a hero. You saw Bug choking and told us, and I think you just saved her life. We wouldn’t have seen it. You saved her. You’re a hero.”
“Are we still going to the beach?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, that’s ok.”
At the hospital my daughter continues to improve. It turns out she wasn’t choking. They think she had a febrile seizure. That’s where very small children can have a temperature spike that will cause them to seize up and stop breathing and go unconscious. Sometimes they will stop breathing for a minute or two.
The pamphlet I have says that while serious, a febrile seizure isn’t really dangerous.
I suppose I can beleive that intellectually, but I know what I saw on the driveway, and nothing would ever be ok again. It was, by far, the worst moment of my life, and right there I would have traded anything, to be where I am now, sitting on this computer telling you about it.
I am so thankful to the EMTs, and the dispatcher, who were magnificent.