Roald's Story :
The day of Roald's accident started as
any other day but ended in a tragedy. On 6 October 1997 I left for
work and as always he sat on my lap driving out of the driveway and his
caregiver took him from me outside. I gave him a hug and kiss
and left for work promising to see him later. At 16H15 I
received a phone call from our caregiver and she hysterically told me that
Roald fell into the swimming pool. I immediately phoned the emergency
services and summoned them to my home. I also asked them to phone my
house and to give instruction to do CPR. I left the office and rushed home,
phoning several times on my way there to make sure that they continue with
CPR. When we finally arrived (it felt like hours..) I found a
policeman standing outside and he followed me in, grabbed my arm and another
policeman lifted a blanket from Roald's head and told me that my son was
dead. I shall never, for the rest of my life, forget what those
words did to me! It later came out that when the policemen arrived,
they stopped a family friend from doing CPR, looked with a torch into
Roald's eyes and felt his pulse and ordered the caregiver to fetch a
blanket. They covered him and stopped CPR although the friend insisted
that they should do more. Eventually the Emergency Services arrived
and started with CPR again, got a pulse within minutes and he was taken to
hospital where he spent 44 days in Intensive Care. The fifteen minutes
under the blanket could so easily have killed our beautiful bright eyed boy
who was so clever at age 2y8m at the time, he knew all his colours and
refused himself to drink from baby bottles a few months before.
He also refused to wear nappies anymore and was totally toilet trained by 2y
old.
Well our lives changed dramatically
and with little help from the hospital and doctors, except that we should
institutionalise him, we took our son home straight from the Intensive Care
unit and we started reading, browsing the internet and joined
support groups (like this one) and today almost 10 years later at age eleven
years old Roald is still with us - THANK GOD! He has a lot of
motor challenges but cognitively he is very much aware of his surroundings
and responds by saying a few words or he will blink his eyes to answer me if
I ask him if he loves me. Roald is the love of my life and only for
him would I have been able to fight the legal battle that lasted eight
+ years and that finally let to compensation in Trust for our brave boy.
My message to parents out there : Never give up, I know I cannot!!
(Elna & Roald from South
Africa)
