Gratitude for Motherly Love - 90 World-Class Motherly Love Stories That Influence a Lifetime

Author: Wen Hua
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: On a crisp autumn morning in October 1986, the warm sunlight shone over a house in the El Mirage Desert area near Los Angeles. A disabled mother, Cindy Dunlop, was watching her 17-month-old daughter, Kiera, playing happily by the pool with her long-haired dog, Cross. Suddenly, the phone rang. Cindy rolled her wheelchair to the nearest phone, which was placed in the garage at the corner of the yard. Due to a car accident years ago, she had been paralyzed from the waist down. She rolled her wheelchair to the garage to answer the call and discovered it was a neighbor calling to chat. After just a few words, Cindy heard splashing sounds coming from the pool. She thought, "It must be Cross jumping in again." The dog jumped into the pool several times a day, but the splashing stopped, and the dog started barking uncontrollably. She immediately felt something was wrong—when the dog jumped in, it would splash, but it wouldn’t bark like this. She hung up the phone and rolled her wheelchair around the corner, heading straight for the pool. Just as she turned the corner, she was startled to see her daughter Kiera had fallen into the pool, face down, floating there. The frantic Cross ran back and forth along the pool edge, barking as if trying to catch the child in the water. Seeing this scene, Cindy nearly fainted. Her husband, Ron, was at work, and it took 90 minutes to get from his workplace to their home. The nearest hospital was 25 miles away, and the closest neighbor was half a mile away. At that moment, she realized no one would arrive in time to help her. She quickly rolled her wheelchair toward the pool. All she had in mind was, "I have to save my child myself." Cindy could swim, something she had learned over the summer to treat her injuries, but Ron always helped her get in and out of the water because she lacked the strength to move her paralyzed lower body. Kiera was floating far from the pool edge at this point. There was no time to stop her wheelchair or find a way to reach Kiera. The only thing Cindy could do was keep rolling her wheelchair straight toward the pool. When Cindy’s wheelchair crashed into the water, she immediately sank. The cold water made it hard for her to breathe, but she struggled to swim with her hands, forcing her eyes to focus on Kiera, who was floating 25 feet away. She quickly swam to Kiera’s side, grabbed her arm with one hand, and pushed her toward the pool edge with the other. When Kiera’s body flipped over, Cindy saw her lips were purple and her eyes were closed, with no sign of breathing. Cindy pushed Kiera to the pool edge, trying to pull her out of the water. But her legs couldn’t kick, so she could only swim with one hand. Unconsciously, she slipped underwater and lost hold of Kiera. She gritted her teeth and swam back, took a deep breath, put her arms under the child, and used her nails to grip the pool edge tightly. Then she pressed her head against the child and pushed her upward. Just as the child’s half-body lifted out of the water, she drowned her own head in the effort, and the child slid off her head and fell back into the pool. Cindy took another breath and tried again, but she failed once more. She tried quickly a third time, this time with more experience. She kept her head straight and lifted her right shoulder higher. When she pushed the child upward again, she felt the child rolling over, then over her hands, and landed on the poolside. Cindy grabbed the pool edge with her arms, pressing her body close to it, and began CPR on her daughter—once, twice—but there was no response. She felt desperate. At that moment, she remembered how she had struggled after the car accident years ago. She started CPR again on her daughter. Finally, her daughter began to breathe, coughing up water. She first coughed, then gasped, and finally started crying. Cindy said loudly, "Don’t be afraid, sweetie, Mom’s here." She saw her daughter’s lips were blue and her eyes were vacant. She knew Kiera might have brain damage due to oxygen deprivation, so she had to call for help immediately. She turned around, swam across the 15-foot-wide pool, and reached the spot where Ron had told her to get out. She used all her strength to pull herself up with her arms and chest, finally dragging her legs onto the shore. Kiera was crying loudly on the other side of the pool. Fearing her daughter might fall in again, Cindy quickly crawled on the cement ground toward her. After a while, she finally reached her daughter and held her tightly. She was too exhausted, but she knew she couldn’t stop. Cindy put the child on her back and crawled toward the grassy yard. Suddenly, she noticed blood on the ground. She immediately checked Kiera and found the child was uninjured, but the blood was coming from her own foot. Her foot had been scraped by the cement, and her hands were also cut. When she reached the grassy yard farther from the pool, she finally put the child down. She knew she could quickly find the phone in her bedroom without her wheelchair. She crawled across the yard to the bedroom, picked up the phone on the nightstand, and dialed 911. Cindy said anxiously to the operator, "My child fell into the pool, and I’ve started breathing for her. She’s crying now." The operator asked, "Where do you live?" She said, "Ash Road." The operator replied, "We’ll send an ambulance right away." Cindy then called her husband, Ron, and told him, "The daughter’s in trouble! She fell into the pool!" Ron heard Kiera’s cries over the phone and told Cindy not to panic. Ron quickly called their neighbor, Hugh Brown, who happened to be home and arrived at Cindy’s house in less than five minutes. By then, both Kiera and Cindy were shivering from the cold. Brown picked up Kiera, took off her wet clothes, dried her with a towel, and put her in bed under the covers. Then he carried Cindy to the bed as well, waiting for the ambulance to take them to the hospital. After they were taken to the hospital, Cindy’s hands and feet were bandaged. The doctor told her, "Kiera is doing well; she has no aftereffects from the lack of oxygen." Although the doctors kept assuring her that Kiera was fine and praised Cindy for bravely saving her daughter, she still felt down. At that moment, Ron entered the room. He hugged his daughter tightly and asked Cindy, "Is Kiera okay?" Cindy nodded. Her husband asked, "And you?" Cindy nodded again. Ron embraced his wife tightly and said, "Cindy, you’re amazing. I knew you’d do this." Cindy’s tears streamed down her face—tears of gratitude and relief. ([American] Jay Stuller) P3-5