• Print Full Article
• Email Article
• Suggest an Article

View Larger

• « Prev
• Next »

Saving Baby Jace

Author: Deborah Coplin
Issue: 2008 April

Sometimes just one thing can change the course of a life. For Lydia and Rocky Campbell, it happened on a cold day in December.

It was the first day of the ice storm, December 10, 2007. Rocky was home because of hazardous road conditions. Lydia had arranged a play date for her children Courtlynn and Jace, with her friend, Molly who had kids the same age as hers. Lydia’s father, two sisters and brother also joined them. There was pizza for the children and chili for the adults.

After the children played for a while, it was naptime. Lydia put three and one-half month old Jace down on his belly on her bed with pillows propped around him like she had done in the past—nothing unusual. He napped for three hours with his parents checking on him every fifteen minutes. It would soon be time for him to eat, so Bethany, Lydia’s sister, went in to wake the baby boy.

“He was just flat on his face and I felt his back to check his breathing. I moved his head, but he didn’t move it back like he usually did,” Bethany said. She ran to get her sister. Both knew something was terribly wrong. The baby was not breathing. Lydia started screaming and her father rushed in, put Jace down on the floor and started CPR.

Someone called 911 while Molly ran outside to find help. She grabbed a neighbor who happened to have prior experience with administering infant CPR and took over from Lydia’s dad.

Amazingly, on streets covered with ice, Edmond Police arrived within seven minutes of being called. EMSA and firefighters followed shortly.

Edmond police officer, Nathan Fountain was the first on the scene. “When I first saw him, he was lying on his side on the floor and he was totally blue,” Fountain said. “He was by all rights dead. It was as if I was holding a dead baby.”

By this time Lydia had escalated to near hysteria, screaming at them to hurry. She felt everything happening in slow motion. She saw her baby dying and stood thinking, from here on, life will be separated into two parts: before this day happened and after.

Paramedics struggled to get Jace’s heart to start beating again. Unable to find a vein, they had to place the IV into the baby’s bone marrow through his knee, a rare but necessary procedure. But before they loaded the baby onto a stretcher and into the ambulance, he had a pulse again.

1 | 2 | Next Page >