SARASOTA, Fla. (WSVN) – A 4-year-old girl survived a near-death experience after she swallowed water in their family pool while playing with a pool noodle.
In a facebook post, Lacey Grace described the scary incident her 4-year-old daughter Elianna Grace dealt with over the weekend. Her daughter was blowing in pool water into one end of her pool noodle and blowing it out of the other end, something Lacey says isn’t abnormal for children.
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“Elianna was playing in the pool with a ‘pool noodle’ on Saturday, and as many many children do every day,” she wrote in the Facebook post.
However, as the 4-year-old tried to blow water out of the noodle, another child blew water into her mouth.
The mother wrote, “By 100% freak accident, Elianna put her mouth to blow out at the same time someone blew in the other end, causing the water to shoot directly down her throat.”
Elianna quickly vomited and appeared to be back to normal. She looked fine the next day, but developed a fever on Monday. The fever persisted, so Grace took her daughter to the doctor, recalling an article she’d read a year ago about a young boy in Texas who died from “dry drowning,” where water inhaled through the mouth or nose ends up in the lungs.
“We went from school to the urgent care, hoping the doctor would say, ‘Her lungs sound great, it’s just viral, etc,'” wrote Grace. “We were there about 10 minutes when the doctor said to get her to the nearest ER as soon as possible. Her heart rate was crazy high, her oxygen was low, and her skin was turning purple which suggested chemical infection.”
Further medical evaluation at the hospital proved the infection to be due to pool chemicals. Elianna Grace now has aspiration pneumonia, her mother said, and is now relying on an oxygen machine to breathe.
Lacey Grace is now encouraging parents to monitor their children while playing in a pool.
“If your child inhales a bunch of water, and something seems off AT ALL, I encourage you to immediately get help,” Grace wrote. “I wonder if I would have taken her Monday, would she be better off?? And I wonder if I waited longer what would have happened. It’s so scary.”
A GoFundMe has been set-up by the Grace family in order to raise money for Elianna’s medical treatment. Click here for more information.
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