A Reminiscence from the 1990s
In the course of my dabbling in health care—first in mountain rescue, and then in ministering to people with HIV—I had not a few experiences of trying to revive people using cardiopulmonary resuscitation. While each failure at this plunges one into the depths of despair, each success conveys a most wonderful feeling of having really made a difference in someone’s life. To my mind, my first success still has the quality of a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, partly, perhaps, because there was an air of the supernatural, and of God-ordered coincidences attached to it.
At the end of a midwinter road trip up-country, Linda and I took the children to the spa at Calitzdorp to enjoy the fun of swimming in hot water even when there was frost on the ground. On the morning in question, a bunch of circumstances lined up in such a way as to save the life of a young boy.
We elected to have pies for brunch, so we all walked down to the shop and bought what we thought were steak pies. When we got back to our chalet, the steak pies proved to be pepper steak, which we didn’t fancy, so Linda decided to walk back to the shop to exchange them. The children wanted to go with her; I volunteered to stay and have a sleep.
About twenty minutes earlier, in a then unconnected event, a family of three that was returning to Somerset West had just hitched their caravan and was heading for the exit. As they passed the outdoor hot pool, their young daughter asked if she could have a last swim. At first the parents were reluctant, but, after she had spent some time pleading, they relented, parked near the pool, and all got into the water.
Meanwhile, another resident family was desperately hunting for their four-year old son, who seemed to have disappeared. The last time they had seen him was when they were in the hot pool, but they had all got out and left the fenced area (they thought).
When the Somerset West family had been in the water for a few minutes, the father kicked against a submerged object. Not sure what it was, he decided to remove it, lest it cause injury to someone. As he reached down to pull it out, he realised that he had grabbed the body of a young boy. He had no idea what to do, so he climbed out, holding the child in his arms, and started calling for help.
There were not many people around at this stage, and the first person on the scene was Linda, with our gaggle of children and a packet of reject pies. She was well-versed in CPR and asked the man to put the child down. He, whether in some kind of panic-stricken catalepsy, or because he was a chauvinist, refused to let go of the child. Linda immediately told Kathleen to run and call me, while she continued arguing with the cataleptic chauvinist.
When I arrived, the man—surrounded by a fast-growing crowd of people doing nothing to help—was still holding tightly onto the child. Linda, confronting him, was showing signs of annoyance. My experience at accident scenes has taught me that it is often fruitless to reason with people. They usually respond better to a slightly more assertive approach.
“Put that child down immediately,” I roared in my best parade-ground voice, as I decelerated from the sprint that had carried me down the hill from our chalet. I have no idea what I would have done had he refused.
To my relief, he immediately put the child down on the grass. I felt the boy’s skin and, in spite of the heat of the pool, he was now icy-cold. There were no signs of respiration, and I couldn’t detect a carotid pulse. I ground my knuckle into his sternum and elicited no response. I opened each eye and it seemed that there was no reaction to the bright Karoo sunlight.
In addition, on a subjective note, he had the pallor that years of experience in recovering bodies from the mountains told me that he was dead. I avoided looking at his parents, who by now had joined the crowd of bystanders.
However, if I’ve learnt only one thing from mountain rescue, it is this: Never give up on a patient.
I muttered to Linda: “This is hopeless. Will you do the heart?”
“OK,” she replied. “I’ll pray while you breathe.” Although I am an asthmatic, my background as a piper always made me the logical choice to do the breathing.
With more of a sense of duty than of expectation, we commenced the procedure—the first time that Linny and I had ever done CPR together. After ten minutes, it still looked like a hopeless case. We kept going, and I wondered how long we should continue before admitting to the boy’s parents that we had failed.
Suddenly the boy vomited! That’s a good sign, if a bit unpleasant for the person doing the rescue breathing. Linny and I immediately stopped CPR.
Astonished, I watched the colour come back into his cheeks and felt his skin grow warm. Barring the birth of my own children, and a few other people’s children, there is no feeling on earth to match the way I felt at that moment. I could see that Linda felt the same. This was the first time I had successfully resuscitated a patient.
Once we felt that the child was stable, we dispatched him to Oudtshoorn hospital. The parents came back later and told us that he seemed fine, but he wasn’t talking. Oh no! Had we done this child any favours? This sounded like brain damage.
We continued praying in the afternoon, feeling rather less victorious than we had felt in the morning.
Around six o’clock the mother came to invite us to share dinner with them, and told us that their son was being kept in the hospital overnight for observation, but that he was talking coherently and that the doctors had pronounced him perfectly healthy. In fact, they joked, he was talking so much that they thought it was more peaceful when he was silent. Their looks of obvious relief gave the lie to their joke.
We tried to convey to the parents that we believed that this was miraculous, but I’m not sure that they really grasped what a narrow escape their child had had.
I have administered CPR since, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but this stands out as a Once-in-a-Lifetime event. To this day, there is no doubt in my mind that this child was clinically dead, and beyond all hope of successful resuscitation.
For some reason, God chose to intervene and turn the order of the physical realm upside-down (or is it right-way-up?).