Sometimes you have runs that just stand out in your mind and will be with you forever.

What a beautiful day it was, the clouds were a white pillow looking fluff and the sun was shining like it had just been formed. It was about seventy-eight degrees and we had just finished cleaning the ambulance inside and out. I had just wiped the hood off when I heard the tones for our squad going off.

Stopping only to hear the dispatcher say possible drowning, my partner and I both got in the truck without saying a word. We had done this many times before so this wasn’t anything unusual. We had received directions and took off toward the scene. Enroute to the scene we got more information from the dispatcher, it involved grandparents who had taken the grandchildren to the lake and during the trip the three year old had fallen into the water, but no one had noticed that he was missing. When they finally found him he had been in the water for around five minutes. The grandfather found him at the front of the boat, face down in the water.

We were about five minutes from the scene and heard radio traffic from Lifeline helicopter, who were on their way to a local hospital to pick up a heart patient. I requested that our dispatcher contact them and divert them to our scene. We had just pulled onto the scene and the dispatcher advised the helicopter would be five minutes out from us. I got out of the ambulance and ran toward to shore with the oxygen tank and all the equipment I was going to need to help resuscitate this child.

What I was not ready for was, the child was handed to me by the grandfather just pulling the boat up to the shore. He told me, “His name is Ian, please save him.” I took Ian, who was wearing only a diaper and little tiny slippers, and ran to my ambulance doing CPR followed by my partner who now had all our equipment. We got a tube down for an airway, IV lines started and placed a heart monitor on Ian. The monitor showed no signs of activity from Ian’s heart, but we kept up the fight for his life.

The Paramedic and Nurse from the helicopter had made it to us by now and they climbed into the ambulance with us. The nurse asked us to stop CPR for a second to check the monitor for heart activity. Beep…beep…beep, it wasn’t much but it was something, the monitor was beeping with a heart rate. The flight crew got Ian ready to fly and they loaded him into the helicopter and flew him to the trauma center.

I turned around after the helicopter had taken off and saw a small object in the road where we had moved from the ambulance to the helicopter and I walked over to pick up one of Ian’s slippers. I gave the slipper to the director of our ambulance service to return to the family. We learned that Ian had lived for a few hours on a ventilator until his parents got to the hospital to be with him. God bless you Ian for making my children more precious to me. They may drive you crazy every once in a while but they are the most precious things on earth.

by Rick S.

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