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Heart defect baby survives ambulance crash

from Cathy (cathyvpreece@aol.com)

Daily Mail

Heart defect baby survives ambulance crash

femail.co.uk - 21st August 2003

His beaming smile is full of the sheer joy of living.

And no wonder. For at the age of six months, Cameron Carville has already proved himself a born survivor.

His parents, Fiona and Steve, can scarcely believe their luck that he is still with them.

Cameron was born with a rare heart defect.

And just three days later, while the couple were still struggling to come to terms with his plight, fate struck them an even more devastating blow.

An ambulance rushing the baby to a specialist hospital for life-saving surgery collided with a police car on a 999 call.

The ambulance overturned, hurling Cameron out on to the road, and the tubes keeping him alive were ripped from his body as he hurtled down the carriageway.

By the time he came to rest, dozens of feet from the site of the impact, his heart had stopped.

His parents, following the ambulance by car, heard the collision as they rounded a bend, and came upon the horrifying scene.

Only now, with Cameron fully restored to health and an investigation into the accident complete, has Mrs Carville, 29, brought herself to talk publicly about it.

'I went numb,' she said. 'I didn't think there was any chance Cameron could be alive.

'All I could do was look over at Steve and shake my head.'

In the confusion, it took several minutes to find the baby on the road.

'When we found him he had a huge hole in his head and was covered in blood,' said the former therapist and part-time singer who is now a full-time mother.

'It was unbearable. We thought the worst had happened when he had his heart defect. We couldn't believe this was happening to him. I remember sitting on the front of a police car and being talked to by a policewoman. I was just in total shock.'

Cameron's nurse and doctor, who received minor injuries in the crash, managed to restart his heart. He was taken on to hospital and treated for a fractured skull and bruising to the brain.

But his injuries meant he was unable to undergo heart surgery for another two weeks, during which time his condition prevented oxygen being transported around his body properly.

His parents could only pray that he would survive.

Luckily the operation, at Guy's Hospital, was an immediate success. And now Cameron has been given the all-clear and is settled in at home in Eastbourne, East Sussex, with his parents and two-year-old sister, Sorcha.

The only signs of his dramatic start to life are a scar on his chest from the surgery and a slight dent in his head from the crash.

'It was an awful period of our lives that we feel so lucky to have come through relatively unscathed,' said Mrs Carville.

The Police Complaints Authority has recently finished investigating how the emergency vehicles, both using sirens and flashing lights, came to collide in Kennington, South London, at around 3am.

The police car, going to back up officers in a car chase, was said by witnesses to have gone through a green light at the same time as the ambulance went through a red.

The Metropolitan Police will be deciding if any further action should be taken.

Mrs Carville and her 38-year-old husband, a secondary school teacher, have collected newspaper cuttings about the accident to be kept with Cameron's baby photos.

'When he is old enough to understand, he can read for himself what happened,' Mrs Carville said.

'He may have a mark on his head and it's important for him to know what he went through.'

But she and her husband prefer to look to the future.

'Those events will always be a bad memory,' she said, 'but we have come through it. We feel incredibly blessed and could never express our full gratitude to the people who saved Cameron's life.'

t.hall@dailymail.co.uk

Find this story at:
http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/standard/article.html?in_article_id=193107&in_page_id=169

©2003 Associated New Media

(posted 7526 days ago)

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