I have super heightened safety awareness at the moment. Our second night here in Bahrain, we were invited to a welcome staff party at the local Dilmun Club (Bit like the Country Club - and we plan on joining it as soon as our visas come through.) The kids could swim, and we were in the bar/restaurant for our party. Annalise wasn't well, with a throat infection, which I had just started combating with over the counter antibiotics (!) and so I had told both of them that they weren't going to go swimming like the other kids, as if one couldn't go, neither could the other as I had to look after them and couldn't be in two places, and it wasn't fair for Annalise.
Both understood this, thankfully, and even when our new neighbours and friends, Tom & Louise (the couple with the three kids under 4) said that they would happily take Juliette and look after her at the pool, something inside of me decided to be strong, and stick with our plan.
Well, no more than 30 minutes later, all hell broke loose at the party. A dad ran in shouting for help, all the senior management ran out, mobile phones at their ears and everything went a little crazy. Tom & Louise's oldest daughter, Lucy (4 years old) had been pulled out of the deep end, completely blue, not breathing. A parent's absolute nightmare.
No one really knows what happened, but it seems that she just got out of her depth, and with the number of people milling about in the pool, no one noticed that she was gone from the 'party' - or at least, not playing like the other kids, in the party.
One of our friends pulled her out of the water and another teacher set to work on resuscitating her as the ambulance was called.
Lucy was out for rather a long time, but amazingly, after many minutes, she was brought back to life. What a hero the teacher was.
I need to review my first aid skills -0 it's been three years since I last went on a course.
But it has left us all rather shaken - and nothing compared to what Tom & Lucy must have gone through, and I am thanking my lucky stars that I didn't sway and let them take Juliette as well, as one more child to look after might have made things turn even more complicated.
All the kids who saw the emergency in the pool have been pretty shaken up by it. Not nice.
Lucy was taken to intensive care and kept in for 24 hours for neurological testing (as she had been 'out' for too long) and lung infection testing - but thank God, she was fine and is as healthy as a horse now.
As soon as she came out of hospital, they took her swimming. A good plan, to prevent her getting a fear of water.
We swim with her every afternoon at our compound pool, and you wouldn't think anything had happened to her.
Therefore, I am on super-heightened safety alert wherever water is concerned. You just cannot take your eyes off a child in the water. Not for even a second.
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