HJBR May/Jun 2019

52 MAY / JUN 2019 I  Healthcare Journal of BATON ROUGE column PEDIATRIC In An Instant It was our first swim of the summer of 2014. My oldest son was three years old and my daughter was two, and we were visiting family who had a pool. While waiting for their sunscreen to soak in, my daughter was sitting right next to me on the porch and my oldest wanted to sit on the top step of the pool to make handprint art with the pool water. Standing about 10 feet from the pool steps, I applied my own sunscreen and was a bit distracted by my daughter explaining something about her princess pool toys for all of about 15 sec- onds or so. When I looked back to check on my son, he was gone. As panic set in, the adrenaline immediately kicked on, my mind slipped into the slow-mo that only happens in dire emergencies, and I noticed the tips of his fingers wiggling just above the surface of the water. He had silent- ly (and I do mean truly without a sound) slipped off the step into three feet of water, with me standing less than 10 feet away. It felt like an absolute eternity covering that short distance, as my legs couldn’t move fast enough to get to him. I will never for- get the look on his face when I got to the pool steps and started down to grab him. It was utter helplessness. He was looking up at me with eyes wide open, panic stricken. I pulled him out of the water, and thankfully (gloriously) he was screaming. I was lucky. Drowning Statistics Drowning is the leading cause of injury related deaths in children between one and four years of age. According to the Center for Disease Control, in 2017 there were 702 children from 0–14 years old who died from drowning in the United States, with 20 of those children being here in Lou- isiana. It is estimated that 70 percent of preschoolers who drown were in the care of one or both parents when the incident occurred. Almost 75 percent of children who drown were “missing” for less than In life we all have those moments where we realize that in the blink of an eye, our world could have been turned upside down. Here’s mine.