|
Toddler
makes full recovery after spending 20 minutes under water
A toddler who fell into a swimming pool and spent almost 20 minutes submerged under water has amazed doctors
and defied medical science by making a full recovery.
By
Nick Britten
Last Updated: 3:14PM GMT 10 Feb 2009
Oluchi
Nwaubani had been playing in a friend's garden when she fell into their swimming pool and sank to the bottom.
She was not
found for almost 20 minutes, double the amount of time the heart can normally keep beating without oxygen and three times
longer than the brain can usually survive.
At the time doctors gave her only a two per cent chance of survival and discussed
with her parents, Junior and Tayo, about turning off her life support machine. They were warned that even if she survived
she would not be move, speak or eat properly.
Yet after three months in hospital Oluchi has defied medical expertise by
making a full recovery and is now back at home.
Mr Nwaubani, 40, a prison officer, said: "The doctors said she would not
be able to talk anymore, she would not walk again - she would be a vegetable.
"But she is walking, she is eating normally
and she is able to say what she wants.
"They said she would never pass urine again because her kidney failed. But she is
passing urine normally now.
"The doctors said that the amount of time she spent in the water meant she would never recover
but when I asked her to say 'hello' to the doctor she tried to speak.
"And then I asked her to wave goodbye and she moved
her hand.
"Her doctor said he couldn't believe what he had just witnessed. Staff were calling her a miracle baby."
Oluchi,
who was two at the time, had gone with her two sisters Ria, 12 and five-year-old Amarachi to a friend's house in Bromley,
Kent, last September.
The other girls had been playing on a trampoline in the front garden when Oluchi wandered out into
the back garden where the covered pool was, and fell in.
She was airlifted to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel
before being transferred to Great Ormond Street, where brain scans revealed that she had starved of oxygen for 18 minutes.
Despite
the bleak outlook, she started breathing on her own again after three days in intensive care and was soon came back to life.
Mr
Nwaubani, from Petts Wood, London, said: "For days afterwards all we were being told was that our daughter had virtually no
chance of survival because she had been under the water for too long.
"They told us it might be better to turn off her
life support machine but my wife and I are both Christians and we just prayed to God that she would pull through
"The doctors
said there was a faint pulse so we clung onto that."
The family are members of the Cornerstone Christian Centre in Bromley
and say fellow worshippers around the world offered prayers of support for Oluchi, now three, throughout her time in hospital.
Mrs
Nwaubani, 40, who works for the Department for International Development, said: "She seems to have defied doctors at every
stage.
"It was hard to explain to her sisters that she was alive because they had seen her die at the pool."
|
