Emergency responder's quick action gets baby breathing again

Marivel Carreon knew that her three-month-old baby daughter Kaxandra was having respiratory problems.

She also knew that babies born prematurely are more likely to go into respiratory arrest, so there was additional reason to worry about her daughter, who was born 10 weeks early, weighed two pounds at birth, and spent her first six weeks in the hospital.

For these reasons, Marivel spent much of the night of March 14 awake in the family's Eastsound home so she could continue checking up on her daughter.

It was around 4 a.m. when she saw Kaxandra take a deep breath, then stop breathing. "I got very scared," Marivel said. She then picked up the phone and dialed 911.

Within eight minutes of the call, Emergency Medical Technician Heather Thomas arrived at the family home. Thomas was already up and at work baking bread at nearby Roses Bakery Cafe when she received the message on her pager.

By the time she walked in the door, Kaxandra's lips had turned purple.

She immediately began administering Cardio-Pulminar Resuscitation. Within seconds, she got the baby breathing on her own.

Heather was soon joined at the Carreon family home by paramedic Jeremy Yoder and six other EMTs who helped provide the baby with emergency care and arranged to have the baby flown by MedFlight helicopter to Children's Hospital in Seattle.

Marivel was unable to accompany the baby on the helicopter, but she took the red-eye ferry to Anacortes, and was at the hospital by 11 a.m. There she found her baby all hooked up to tubes, but on the way to recovery. Mother and daughter returned home a few days later.

To help prevent this from happening again, Kaxandra is now hooked up to an oxygen monitoring device when she sleeps at night. The machine indicates if the baby's oxygen level is declining, and therefore is cause for alarm. With each passing day, the likelihood of a recurrence gets less and less.

Thinking back on the incident, Marivel describes it as a "miracle." She also thanks the Orcas Island Fire Department's Emergency Medical Services staff for a job well done. "All who helped us were really good," she said.

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