In the News - Boy’s death highlights a hidden danger: Dry drowning

This article really caught my eye: Boy’s death highlights a hidden danger: Dry drowning.

What the heck is "Dry Drowning"? According to a Wikipedia article on Dry Drwoning,

Dry drowning is when a person's lungs become unable to extract oxygen from the air, due primarily to:

--Muscular paralysis
--Puncture wound to the torso (affecting ability of diaphragm to create respiratory movement)
--Changes to the oxygen-absorbing tissues
--Persistence of laryngospasm when immersed in fluid
--Breathing any gas other than oxygen, that does not kill the patient on its own, for too long. (e.g. Helium)

The person may effectively drown without any sort of fluid. In cases of dry drowning in which the victim was immersed, very little fluid is aspirated into the lungs. The laryngospasm reflex essentially causes asphyxiation and neurogenic pulmonary oedema.

Dry drowning can occur clinically, or due to illness or accident, or be deliberately (and repeatedly) induced in torture (waterboarding). It can be traumatizing, and it can be deadly.

Oh my gosh!! I honestly didn't know something like this existed!!

According to the Dr. Daniel Rauch, a pediatrician from New York University Langone Medical Center...the phenomenon of dry drowning is not completely understood. But medical researchers say that in some people, a small amount of inhaled water can have a delayed-reaction effect.

"It can take a while for the process to occur and to set in and cause difficulties," Rauch said. "Because it is a lung process, difficulty breathing is the first sign that you would be worried about."

The second sign is extreme fatigue, which isn’t always easy to spot. "It’s very difficult to tell when your child is abnormally tired versus normal tired after a hot day and running around in the pool," Rauch said. "The job of the lungs is to get oxygen into the blood and your brain needs oxygen to keep working, so when your brain isn’t getting oxygen, it can start doing funny things. One of them is becoming excessively tired, losing consciousness and the inability to be aroused appropriately."

Finally, there are changes in behavior, Rauch said — another tough call when dealing with very small children, whose moods and behavior can change from one minute to the next.

"Another response of the brain to not getting oxygen is to do different things," Rauch explained, saying parents should be concerned "if your child’s abnormally cranky, abnormally combative — any dramatic change from their normal pattern."

So, now you know a little bit about a condition that maybe you didn't know existed. I know it seems, at lest to me, like I have enough to worry about when it comes to my daughter, but I always try to err on the side of too much information and I am sorry for the mom in this article's loss but I am glad that it has roused awareness.