A Florida mother has warned of the dire dangers of “dry drowning” after her daughter swallowed water from a swimming pool.
Annie Gallagher’s five-year-old daughter was enjoying a summer day when she was submerged for just a moment.In the blink of an eye I was breathing again. coughing.
At first, Gallagher didn’t think anything of it. “He seemed fine and wanted to play again, and he did,” the mother of three said.
But later that night, the little girl crawled into her mother’s bed, complaining that she didn’t feel well.
Annie Gallagher’s daughter was just five years old when she suffered a “dry drowning” incident
Ms Gallagher said that while her daughter seemed fine at first, she later complained that she was not feeling well and seemed tired.
“Honestly, my first reaction was to send her back to her room to get a good night’s sleep because I still had to clean the house for the next day,” Gallagher said. “But something inside me was saying, ‘Don’t do it.'”
Ms. Gallagher rushed her daughter to the emergency room, where doctors discovered she had suffered “dry drowning,” a lung injury that occurs when water is inhaled into the airway rather than swallowed through the digestive tract.
The boy had suffered a lung infection called aspiration pneumonia, which occurs when foreign objects or substances enter the airways and irritate them so much that they cause an inflammatory reaction.
When water enters the airways, it cuts off access to them, making breathing difficult.
“(Doctors) then determined that if I had not taken her that night, the outcome would have been catastrophic,” Gallagher said.
‘She had begun to slowly suffocate as she drowned in her own fluids that flooded her lungs.’
However, the term “dry drowning” is controversial. While some Internet users have said it can occur by swallowing only a small amount of water, other health agencies have said the patient must be completely submerged, which would not make it “dry drowning.”
Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, said in May that drowning “can happen to anyone any time there is water.”
Ms Gallagher’s daughter spent seven days in hospital with aspiration pneumonia. Doctors said that “if she had not been taken that night, the outcome would have been catastrophic”.
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However, the National Drowning Prevention Alliance (NDPA) states that “for drowning to occur, the child or adult must have been submerged in water.”
‘Drowning cannot occur by swallowing water or simply playing with it.’
Dr. Purva Grover, a pediatric emergency physician at the Cleveland Clinic, wrote in a hospital blog that while dry drowning is not an actual medical term, “if you have a near-drowning incident, symptoms may appear after you have left the water.”
Even 12 hours later, you may experience breathing problems as your lungs swell with water.
Ms Gallagher’s daughter was rushed to a children’s hospital within hours, causing so much stress that the mother fainted and ended up in the emergency room.
“I couldn’t believe my son was in critical condition,” Gallagher said. “I asked myself, ‘How could this happen?'”
However, her daughter responded well to antibiotics and was discharged from the hospital a week later. “Suddenly, life had returned to her eyes,” Gallagher said.
“Just watching my daughter get out of bed or out of her wheelchair allowed me to breathe and smile with her. She laughed for the first time in a week and nothing could have been more beautiful than that moment.”
The girl is now 12 years old and healthy, and still swims regularly despite the scare.
“I want parents to know that these things happen,” Gallagher said. “We can’t put our kids in a bubble, unfortunately, but we have to keep living.”
“The best thing we can do is be aware of the safety risks, teach our children and watch their backs while they are still learning.”
‘But most of all, as a parent, trust your instincts. Mine saved my daughter’s life.’
