Summer of 1980, Pleasanton, California

By Darcy Asbe

I have no recollection of the day my life nearly came to an end – I had a mere 18 months under my belt – though I’ve heard the story countless times.

It was a beautiful summer day in Pleasanton, California, and I was spending the morning playing on the back lawn of my family’s home. My mom was in the kitchen, doing some housecleaning, maybe, or cooking a pot of spaghetti.

The kitchen windows were broad and wide, and they looked directly out over the back porch and onto the expanse of green grass. From this viewpoint, she could keep an eye on me while I played with my toys and traipsed around in my diaper, following the dog throughout the yard. She had done the same on many summer days with my three older brothers.

The telephone rang, and my mom welcomed the break from slicing onions or mopping the floor to answer it. I don’t know who was calling, but the conversation must have been engaging; some minutes went by before she glanced out the window again. This time, I was nowhere in sight.

My mother immediately hung up the phone, flew through the open sliding glass door and ran outside.

The lawn where I had been playing was the larger of two in our backyard, the smaller one resting on the other side of a wrought-iron fence next to the black-bottom swimming pool. From the back deck, and still in stride, her glance shot out across the yard, over the fence and toward the pool.

There in the deep end was my diaper-clad infant body, floating quietly like a harbor buoy. She ran across the lawn, flung the gate open and scooped me out of the water. There was no rise and fall of breath in my chest, and my stomach was bloated to nearly three times its normal size from all the water I had swallowed in an attempt to breathe while submerged.

If my mom hadn’t been a practicing labor-and-delivery nurse with annual requirements by the state of California to renew her infant resuscitation certification, I probably wouldn’t be here to write this story. But she was. And I am.

Grabbing my ankles, she turned my lifeless body upside down, took the palm of her hand and pressed it firmly on my abdomen, releasing all the excess water from my stomach in hope that my lungs would feel free to expand with life once again. She whisked me back across the lawn and inside the house, and she laid me on the kitchen table, where she found that I still was unresponsive, not breathing.

How she didn’t crack into a million pieces at this point, I will never know.

For no apparent reason, my uncle Bruce stopped by right then. He came in through the garage like everyone who ever frequented our house did, and he found my mom talking encouragingly to my lifeless body while she forced breath into my motionless lungs. He immediately ran to the rotary phone hanging on the kitchen wall and dialed 911. The news he got from the other end of the line was not encouraging.

Our house was located in an area between Danville and Pleasanton that, at the time, was relatively undeveloped. The closest ambulance would be coming from Danville, 10 miles away down a winding country road, and the outpost was so new that it didn’t yet have equipment for infants.

The dispatcher told my frazzled uncle to put us in the car and start driving. The ambulance would meet us on the road.

At this point, I lay on our wooden kitchen table, unconscious but sporadically breathing on my own. This was an improvement. My uncle grabbed the keys to our station wagon while my mom scooped up my limp body and climbed into the backseat.

They sped off down the road, north toward town, through the golden hills of the Tassajara Valley. After several miles, they saw the ambulance approaching, and as it got closer, they stopped and flagged it down.

An unsuspecting man was riding his bicycle near where they stopped. My mom hastily threw the car keys at him and asked him to park the car somewhere off the shoulderless road. It didn’t matter where, or even if she ever saw the car again.

Once we were in the ambulance, the paramedics took my vital signs and found that my pupils were fixed and dilated, a grim prognosis at best. A person whose eyes are fixed and dilated is, in most cases, as good as dead.

I was occasionally breathing on my own and letting out what my mom describes as awful, strange moans. By some incredible, superhuman, maternal force, my mom was able to keep it together, patting the bottoms of my feet and encouraging me, “Come on Darcy, keep breathing! Stay with me! You can do it! Keep breathing!”

The ambulance driver was headed for the Kaiser hospital in Walnut Creek, which had the nearest emergency room. But having been a nurse for more than ten years, my mom had virtually no faith in Kaiser’s medical services. She insisted that they take me to John Muir hospital, despite the fact that it was a few miles farther.

A mother with a young child whose life is in grave danger is not a force to be reckoned with. The driver conceded.

By the time we reached John Muir, I had begun to breathe on my own but still remained unconscious. Once I became stable, I was transferred to the Children’s Hospital in Oakland, where I remained unconscious for what must have felt like an eternity to my poor mom.

Without the modern convenience of a cell phone, it took her some time to reach my dad, who was working for the Hayward Fire Department. It wasn’t until he arrived in the hospital room, more than three hours after the incident, that I opened my tiny eyes and looked around the room.

For me, it was as if nothing had ever happened, and after keeping me for a night of observation, I was released back into the world I had only just begun to know. The doctors felt certain that I hadn’t suffered any brain damage, though to this day, my brothers love to contest that diagnosis.

While I have no conscious memory of the day I fell in the pool, my mom suffered anxiety attacks for some time afterward. She would be at the grocery store, doing our shopping while I was in the care of a babysitter, and fear would suddenly come over her. She would ditch the cart in the dairy aisle, run outside to the nearest pay phone, and call home.

“Where is Darcy?” she would ask in a voice laden with panic. “Put her on the phone. I have to hear her voice.”

To this day, my mom is hypersensitive about children and water. I can only imagine the horror that lies deep within her surrounding that day. Sometimes she speaks of the secret guilt she carries, like somehow it was her fault that I managed to squeeze through the tiny space between the bars of our iron fence. But I feel nothing but grateful when I think of that day.

My mother’s strength and focus on doing what any medical professional would do during a crisis, despite the fact that it was her own baby girl lying lifeless, still amaze me.

Everyone owes their life to their mom, but I owe it to mine twice.

Darcy Asbe resides in San Francisco, where she works hard as a Jane of All Trades, Master of None.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, May 18th, 2007 | Email This Post

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