Summer holidays and swimming pools go hand-in-hand.

For most mums, the image of their children attempting their first clumsy strokes or splashing happily with siblings will be forever ingrained in their memory.

But as one mother will attest, a day at the pool can go from a fond family memory to an incident which can change the course of one's family history forever.

Rachel Lister, who recalled a recent horrifying moment in a blog piece entitled Drowning Really Is Silent, urges parents to exercise extreme caution while in the vicinity of water with their children.

Rachel’s message is clear: You can never be too careful and you can never assume someone else is considering the safety of your child.

In an incredibly moving piece, Rachel, in painstaking detail, recalls the moment she found her two-year-old daughter floating face down in a hot tub after a family pool party.

Having forbidden her daughter from entering the tub, Rachel momentarily turned her back before realising her toddler had made her way from a chair to the hot tub which was obscured by a number of bushes.

“We had six adults standing there so I felt like I could relax a bit. After all, what could go wrong with so much supervision? The truth is, you can never relax when you have kids around the water. Never.” she insists.

With heartbreaking clarity, Rachel recalls jumping into the tub fully clothed, writing: “I don't know if it was the shock of the situation or the fact that I was only a month after my C-section and hadn't fully recovered yet but I couldn't get my body to move the way I wanted.”

Struggling to rescue her little girl, Rachel remembers: “I couldn't get my daughter's head above the water fast enough. I'd managed to push her closer to the edge and by then my husband was at the edge. He was holding one of the twins and reaching into the water with his other hand.”

Despite the fact Rachel had CPR training, she reveals the shock left her paralysed meaning she was incapable of administering treatment, writing: “I froze. What was I supposed to do? What was the first step? There was no room for any thought in my mind except that my child was not breathing.”
 


Paying tribute to her husband, Rachel writes: “My husband did a Heimlich maneuver of sorts and pushed some water out of her tiny body. Reflexively, she began to vomit. Finally she coughed and took a breath.”

Rushing their daughter to hospital, Rachel and her husband were  informed that their little girl’s oxygen levels were in the 80s, her carbon dioxide levels were high and she had fluid in her lungs.

Requiring transferral to the children’s hospital, Rachel and her husband could only watch on as their child was wheeled away by a team of doctors.

Recalling the heartbreaking moment, Rachel wrote: “[Leaving] my husband and me standing in the hallway holding my daughter's wet bathing suit as strangers took my daughter to the helicopter that would fly away without us.”

Thankfully, after 24 hours on a ventilator and a further 24 under observation, Rachel’s little girl made a full recovery, but her stricken mother knows how close she came to death.

“The doctor told us my daughter likely had another 30 seconds before her heart stopped. When I think of how close things were I get chills.” she writes.

Desperate to highlight the speed at which a situation can escalate, she questions: “How does this happen? It took only minutes. There were plenty of adults around. None of us heard a thing.”

Perhaps most frightening of all, Rachel learned that her situation is by no means rare, explaining: “At the hospital we were told they see their worst-case scenarios at family gatherings when there's plenty of people to supervise. Everyone thinks someone else is watching. Everyone thinks they can relax .”

Rachel urges parents to consider every eventuality when their children are near water as it takes mere seconds before a potential tragedy can unfold.

“My daughter made no noise . . . she couldn't. She didn't splash. She didn't yell for help. We were all standing 10 feet away while she drowned.”

While Rachel’s little girl has shown no signs of distress following the terrifying incident, her mum can’t boast the same, writing: “The water is never going to look quite the same.”

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