CPE educator

By Chelsey St-Pierre
The Suburban

“I turned around for just a few seconds to grab my water bottle when my son shouts out to me that his sister is at the bottom of the pool,” Catherine Couture, a mother of four and former CPE educator, from the off-Island suburb of Coteaux-du-Lac located just a few minutes West of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, explained to The Suburban. “A few seconds before she was having lunch with her siblings.”

Luckily in this case, Couture’s nearly two-year old daughter survived, and a study recently released by Dr. Hussein Wissanji, a pediatric surgeon at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, depicts just how lucky this family was.

According to the statistics revealed by the study, it is estimated that one child will be brought into an emergency room from drowning, or near drowning on each day of the summer, in Quebec this year.

Wissanji says that parents and guardians need to view water the same way they view fire. “You would not leave your child alone with an open fire,” Wissanji explains as he encourages parents to change their view on water based activities. According to Wissanji’s study, one in ten children brought into the ER due to no supervision or a gap in supervision when playing near water will die of drowning with the majority of them being toddlers.

In Couture’s case, two mothers were present at the play date held at her pool to supervise six children. When the children paused for their lunch break, their floaters were removed while they were on deck and eating.

“When I turned around after my son called out to me, I just saw her pink bathing suit and her blond hair floating at the bottom of the pool,” Couture explained to The Suburban emotively. Couture jumped in to the pool to pull her daughter out of the water and when she got out with her toddler in her arms, the girl was conscious, but the nightmare was not over. “I felt her body filled with water, it is hard to explain, she was just full of water.”

Moments later, the toddler threw up a “large” amount of water, according to Couture’s account. As it turns out, this was the second stroke of luck for the little girl. “I called my husband and we brought her to the ER where she was seen by a nurse who said that throwing up was a good thing, that a good amount of water had exited her body decreasing her chances of drowning, but that we had to continue to supervise for 48 hours in case of ‘dry drowning.’

Couture said that the nurse explained that dry drowning is a term used to describe drowning from water build up in the lungs that can happen up to 48 hours after a near-drowning experience. “She has been sleeping with us since this happened and I watch her for each breath to be sure that it is not her last one.”

On a third stroke of luck, Couture said the little girl wanted to jump right back into the pool after the experience, which is sometimes not the case for children after a traumatizing experience with water or any other element. “Many people have reached out to me and I realize how incredibly lucky we have been and I want to make others aware or remind them that this can really happen to anyone at any time and that there is no such thing as being too vigilant.”

Since the incident, Couture applied new regulations around her children’s pool activities, such as serving their lunch outside of the fenced-in area surrounding the pool and increasing the number of supervising adults per child ratio. n