-
EternBoyX.
User deleted
Hearing my four-year-old son’s cry from the next room, I assumed he had fallen out with his playmate over a toy, or their favourite spot on the sofa, where I’d last seen them sitting together, watching TV.
But as I stood up to investigate, Christian stumbled into the room, tears streaming down his face, hands clutching his neck.
My friend, whose home we were visiting last Friday evening, gently steered Christian towards me and, as he stretched out his arms, I spotted an angry red mark circling his neck.
A close call: Christian, four, who clearly shows the marks around his neck, was saved by his older brother when he got caught in a blind cord and nearly hung himself from it
In the sickening seconds which followed, I learned that Christian and his friend had been jumping off the windowsill when a loop, which had formed in a venetian blind cord, caught around my son’s neck, leaving him hanging and unable to free himself.
More...
Shipping tycoon's two-year-old daughter found lifeless by family's nanny 'in the corner of her crib with the window blind cord around her neck'
The child killer in your home: The week the daughter of a shipping tycoon became the TWELFTH victim in two years killed after getting tangled in window blind cord
Heartbreak for family of three-year-old girl who dies as window blind cord ensnares neck while she naps
Toddler dies after getting window blind cord wrapped around his neck despite GP parents' desperate battle to save him
My throat constricted as the older children, who’d been in the room watching a film as the near-tragedy unfolded, recounted how my eldest child, 11-year-old Daniel, had leapt off the couch, lifted Christian by his armpits and unhooked the killer cord from around his neck.
Mercifully, Daniel had reacted in seconds. Deeply shaken by the event, Daniel later told me it had seemed to have taken an age to work out how to free his little brother.
Sickening discovery: Helen, centre, found out that just a few feet away, while she was oblivious, her youngest son Christian, left, had come perilously close to tragedy, but was saved thanks to his older brother Daniel, right
Chillingly, I’ve since discovered through the Blind Cords Safety Campaign that it can take just 20 seconds for a child to be strangled to death by a blind cord. Brain damage can occur even sooner.
Christian cried inconsolably for a full 15 minutes after his near-miss, his little body shaking as I cradled him on my lap. I just kept thanking God that my older boy had been in the room with the little ones.
Eager not to add to my son’s distress, I fought an overwhelming urge to break down.
I in no way blame my friend for what happened. Highly safety-conscious, she had carefully wound the blind cord around a metal cleat beyond the children’s reach.
Indeed, most blinds come with these cleats as a safety measure: a wooden or metal fitting that can be fixed to a wall so the cord can be wrapped around it.
But clearly cleats are not infallible, as we discovered. Without a clear account from either boy, we are left to assume that one of them yanked on the wound cord as they stood on the windowsill, oblivious to the fact this left a loop hanging in mid-air, which fast became a deadly noose.
Quick thinking: Christian, four, left, was saved by brother Daniel, 11, right, who managed to pick him up by the armpits and lift him free from the cord which had become tangled around his neck
This accident, I now realise, could just as easily have happened in our home, where we have similar blinds and wind the cord around hooks fitted high on the window frames.
While Christian and his four-year-old friend were told in no uncertain terms that it had been very naughty of them to first climb onto and then jump off the windowsill, the shocking outcome was clearly punishment enough for them.
In the hours that followed, Christian was as upset about people knowing he had done something wrong in jumping off the sill as he was about the stinging pain around his neck.
It was clear from his ability to move his neck and the lack of swelling or bruising that nothing had been broken. However, to be on the safe side, we Skyped my sister, an advanced nurse practitioner who lives 200 miles away, and she prescribed paracetamol and TLC.
So I gave Christian a spoonful of Calpol then laid with him until he fell asleep, exhausted, in my bed.
Studying the gash around my son’s neck, I finally allowed my mind to explore the horrors of what might have happened had Daniel not reacted so fast. Terrible images flooded my mind of my husband and I being led into a mortuary.
Tragically, at least 25 children in Britain have been strangled to death by cord blinds since 1999, 12 of them in the past three years.
Danger: The increase in the number of deaths involving blind cords similar to this one has led to campaigners calling on them to be banned
The Royal Society For The Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) says the figure could even be far higher as, since 2002, such deaths have been logged under the umbrella term ‘accidents in the home’. Consequently, RoSPA is largely reliant on reports in the press and information from coroners.
Not surprisingly, given the shock he’d had, Daniel said he’d lain awake for hours that night, replaying events and recalling the look on his brother’s face.
‘Christian was trying to cry but, because of the rope squeezing his throat, he couldn’t make any noise,’ Daniel told me the following day. ‘His eyes were wide open and he looked really scared.
‘I was panicking, trying to work out how to get him down. It was awful — like looking into the face of my dying brother.’
What chills me most is the thought that had Christian been alone in the room, albeit a mere six steps from where I was sitting, neither I nor the other mums in the house would have been alerted to the fact that he was being strangled to death because the cord must have been pressing on his voicebox.
We had been checking on the children regularly. In fact, my friend walked into the room just as Daniel was steadying Christian back down on the floor.
How fate has an unpleasant habit of mocking us. Only a couple of months ago, I read the sad story of Alexandra Lucy Hoegh — a recent victim of this killer in our homes — and thought: ‘Thank heavens my children are past that stage now: it’s one less thing to worry about’.
Alexandra, the three-year-old daughter of Morten Hoegh, one of Britain’s richest men, was found by her mother, Dana, lifeless in her cot, with a blind cord around her neck.
It is thought Alexandra had been playing with the cord of a window blind when she became tangled. Neighbours described how Mrs Hoegh ran screaming into the street outside her £12 million home in West London, begging for help.
That could so easily have been me.
I’ve always been a very protective mother, but with them all growing up, and Christian about to turn five, I’ve recently stopped watching them every single minute of the day.
And RoSPA does say that the majority of children who suffer blind cord deaths are around two — an age when they are mobile but have no sense of risk or danger.
‘Most children killed by blind cords are toddlers who have died in their rooms at a time when their parents thought they were sleeping,’ says RoSPA’s Michael Corley.
‘Our advice to parents is not to put blinds with cords in their children’s bedrooms.’
Home danger: There has been 12 deaths in the past two years where children under four have been strangled by chords of venetian blinds
Campaigners are lobbying the EU to get on with the job of ratifying new safety legislation to ensure all newly manufactured cord blinds come fitted with break connectors.
This would mean that the cord would snap when weight, like that of a child, pulls down on it.
Christian’s near-miss has left me paranoid about every potential threat to his safety. I’ve gone back to reminding him not to run up and down stairs, and to use the proper steps on our garden slide.
Over the past few days, Daniel has found roughly half a dozen opportunities to remind his little brother that he saved his life.
Brothers will be brothers, and I rejoice in the knowledge that they will still be reminiscing about Daniel’s heroism and Christian’s lucky escape over a pint in the pub when they are grown men.
Surely it is high time the EU rubber stamps this important legislation governing blinds. And that parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles fully comprehend the lethal danger hanging at our windows.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-...l#ixzz2LKrPGn1Y
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook. -
.
.
Web