Jess Battison
This article contains topics some readers may find upsetting
A traumatised mum has issued a warning to other parents following a ‘near drowning’ experience with her toddler.
Rachel Barton Lister and her family had been celebrating her eldest son’s birthday with a fun pool party, and like a lot of toddlers, her two-year-old daughter ‘loved splashing around the water in her life jacket’.
And of course, the family have always been very careful around water.
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Rachel writes for TODAY: “I thought I knew how quickly an accident could happen.”
However, when they were packing up to leave the party, a terrifying ordeal occurred.
Wrapped up in a towel and sitting without her life jacket, the little girl wanted to get back in her favourite thing - the hot tub - but was told ‘it’s time to go home’.
“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?” Rachel recalls after she sat her daughter on a nearby deck chair while she packed away their things.
But she adds regretfully: “You can never relax when you have kids around the water. Never.”
After leaving her sitting on the deck chair for a ‘few minutes’ something urged the mum to attention, and she realised her daughter was ‘nowhere to be seen’.
Running over to the hot tub, she was ‘horrified’ to find the toddler face-down in the centre.
Rachel writes: “They always say that time slows down in an emergency but it’s an odd sensation when it happens to you. What must have only been a matter of seconds felt like an eternity.
“My husband quickly passed off the baby and began frantically working on my daughter. She wasn’t breathing.
“That image will stay with me for as long as I live. Her eyes were open, but there was no life in them.”
Eventually they got the little girl breathing again and rushed her to the hospital.
The toddler had fluid in her lungs and high carbon dioxide levels, but the doctor kept telling the mum she’d be fine.
She was taken by helicopter to a children’s hospital where spent 24 hours on the ventilator.
Fortunately, the girl is ‘every bit as stubborn, smart, and wonderful as she was before her accident’.
But the mum is urging other parents: “You cannot relax around kids and water. Drowning can happen in seconds. It’s quick and it’s quiet and it can happen to your child.
“At the hospital they told us they see the worst case scenarios at family gatherings where there are plenty of people to supervise. Everyone thinks someone else is watching. Everyone thinks they can relax.”
The family are grateful for a ‘happy ending’ but Rachel says: “We’re all feeling a bit traumatized, and that experience is going to stay with me forever.”