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It’s true. Bronson Staker was dead when he arrived at the hospital after drowning in his bathtub. But Friday morning he was burbling happily on his father’s lap while his parents were interviewed on the Today Show, more interested in his dad’s cell phone than his own miraculous recovery.
Six weeks ago, Bronson’s mother, Sara, put him in the tub for a bath. She stepped away momentarily to deal with another of her children, and when she came back she found Bronson face down in the water. ”It was horrible. It was the most helpless feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” Sara told the Today Show. ”There was no question in my mind that he was gone. He was white, his lips were blue. His eyes were rolled back.”
Emergency responders were also unable to revive Bronson and he was declared DOA – Dead On Arrival – when he reached the hospital. But his doctors didn’t give up, and forty minutes later they finally restored a heartbeat, while a ventilator pumped oxygen into Bronson’s lungs. Bronson’s doctors told his parents that it was very likely that their baby would have serious brain damage from having been oxygen deprived for so long, but there was something that might help reduce that chance. An experimental treatment that could help them recover more of the child they’d lost.
That treatment is called Therapeutic Hypothermia. They would lower Bronson’s body temperature to 91 degrees, 8 degrees below normal, and put him in a medically induced coma to reduce brain swelling. The Staker’s agreed, and for almost 2 weeks they watched, helpless, as their baby slept alone in a cooling unit, puffy and cold to the touch. “It was excruciating, because every fiber of your being as a mother wants to hold your child, especially when they’re hurting.” Sara told the Today Show. “You want to hold him and hug him and wrap him in a blanket and keep him warm.”
Doctors had told the Stokers that Bronson would probably not be the boy they’d known when he woke up. That he would likely be the equivalent of a 16 month old newborn, needing months or years of rehab. But Bronson didn’t get the memo – when he woke up, he was fully alert. ”I walked in the room and the lights were on. Immediately I could see that he was tracking and connecting and looking from on nurse to the other. When I walked in, he lifted his chin and I could see that he knew who I was,” His mother says.
By the time the family took Bronson home, he’d achieved every bench mark doctors had set for him for the next year – he was back to his old self. In fact, he walked out of the hospital on his own two feet.
Bronson’s parents hope that other parents will learn from their hard lesson. As Sara put it, “Life is so fragile. As parents, we’re so busy and we try to multi-task things. It’s really easy to get distracted by the things that aren’t the most important things, and the things that are the most important suffer.”
