Mother of two, Nikki Griffiths, shares her harrowing experience of the moment her son, Tom, stopped breathing as a newborn. Thankfully, Nikki had learnt the lifesaving skills of CPR and was able to save her young son’s life.
Transcript:
"I was holding him in my arms, sort of cradling him after a feed. I remember just glancing away and looking back again and when I came back he was quite pale, at which point I looked at my friend who was standing, and then when I looked back again he was blue, and his lips had gone a really quite dark purple colour.
"Luckily, before I had brought him home, we actually went through a CPR course, a first aid course, so we knew what to do and I assessed pretty quickly that he wasn’t breathing.
"I asked my friend to call the paramedics, call triple zero and she did that. The training kicked in, and I started doing the compressions and a few breaths, and he started breathing and, you know, you kind of think that’s it. You think ‘okay they’re breathing now, that’s great’. I brought him up[right] to keep giving him little pats, give him a rock, and he actually stopped breathing again. The paramedics haven’t yet arrived.
"It was probably about the third round, I was doing compressions, and there was movement and he started sort of crying and the colour came back immediately. The colour was the thing that I noticed because he’d been very blue with the sort of bright purple lips.
"It seems like I was very calm – it turns out I wasn’t a bit later on – but yeah, at the time I felt quite calm because of the training. The ambulance arrived very quickly, it felt like by the time we got the address out they kind of materialised and they put him onto oxygen and then we went off in the ambulance. That’s when I started to, to sort of fall apart.
"We arrived at the hospital and a nurse said “how are you?” and I just burst into tears, and then I realised the enormity of it."
"I believe that had I not known what to do, that Thomas may not be with us today. And that’s really something that I, I don’t really want to even go there with my thoughts. But knowing what to do is so vitally important."