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Published on 12/09/1996 All articles from this issue

Near-drowning has happy ending

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By Joanne Griffith Domingue

Town Crier Staff Writer

What began as every parent's nightmare finished with pure joy.

As this Los Altos mother looked out her window about 5:30 p.m. Nov. 25, she saw her 4-year-old daughter floating face down in the family's unheated swimming pool.

When Los Altos firefighers arrived, there was no detectable heartbeat, said fire Capt. Bob Mordecai. No one knew how long she had been in the water.

"The cold water helped us," Mordecai said, since it allows the brain to go longer without oxygen without suffering damage. "We worked on her on the edge of the pool."

The fact that the family lived hear the Sequoia Fire Station on Almond Avenue also helped, he said, which allowed firefighters to arrive so quickly.

"We did our mechanical breathing and got her system oxygenated," Mordecai said. They bundled the still-unconscious little girl into blankets and then paramedics took her to El Camino Hospital in Mountain View.

She was later transferred to the Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.

Two days later, which was the day before Thanksgiving, "the mother called us and said her daughter was home and that this was the best Thanksgiving she had ever had," Mordecai said.

Later that day, the firefighters who had responded to the initial "drowning" call went back, this time to take a teddy bear to the recovering girl, said firefighter Kathy Roberts.

Los Altos Girl Scouts supply the firefighters with teddy bears, which they carry on the fire engines, to give to children who "bump their heads or get hurt," Roberts said. "We hand them a teddy bear, and it comforts them."

Mordecai said the little girl has suffered no discernible brain damage.

Roberts said that the mother was doing cardiopulmonary resuscitation when the firefighters arrived.

"Parents should know CPR, especially if they have a pool," Roberts said.

"This call shined a light on all the bad things we go out on," she said.

The mother, who asked not to be identified, said her daughter doesn't remember anything about her near-drowning and that the doctor told her she may never remember anything about it.