Miracle baby survives near-drowning

CLOSE CALL—A grateful Billy McKinney holds his children Paige, 13 months, and Seth, 3, in his Agoura Hills backyard. Last month Billy rescued Paige from the family pool and revived her with CPR. Paige McKinney toddles around her Agoura Hills home handing anyone in her path one of the baseball cards clutched in her small fist.

She offers the cards with a toothy smile, making it impossible to say no to the 13-monthold with her blonde curls and blue eyes.

Paige’s dad, Billy McKinney, 35, watches Paige shuffle the stack of cards around on the floor and simply shakes his head and smiles. To Billy and his wife Emily, their daughter is a living miracle.

It was a few minutes after 7 p.m. on Tues., Aug 2 when Billy found the 1-year-old face down in the deep end of the family’s pool. According to Billy, she had gotten out into the backyard through a sliding glass door that had been left open a few inches.

Billy, a trained EMT (Emergency Medical Technician), jumped into the pool, grabbed his daughter and shot straight to the surface.

With Paige in his arms, Billy yelled for his mother to call 911. Billy quickly realized his daughter’s once rosy cheeks were now blue. Her eyes were half open, and she had stopped breathing. What he did next may very well have saved her life.

Billy laid Paige down on the grass and began to perform CPR. “I was so scared that I really wasn’t doing it exactly like I should have,” Bill said. “But once I started breathing into her mouth, I could feel her breathing into mine. I stood back, waited a second and then started rescue breathing again . . . Her chest began to rise and fall . . . She was breathing again.”

Within minutes, deputies with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department arrived on the scene. “The response time from the police was incredible,” Billy said.

“Our department is very aggressive when it comes to rescues,” said Deputy James Mee, the first officer to arrive. “When you hear it’s a drowning child . . . you do everything you can to get to the scene as quickly as possible.”

Mee, knowing emergency medical help would soon arrive, led the family to the front of the house so Paige, who was breathing but still incoherent, would receive medical attention as quickly as possible.

“The horror was just inconceivable,” Billy said. “I couldn’t believe this was happening to us.” Once the paramedics, the fire department and other emergency medical personnel arrived, Paige was taken to Sumac School, where a medical helicopter could land to transport her to the hospital.

“We were turned away from Holy Cross (Hospital), USC (Hospital) and Childrens Hospital,” Billy said. “They were all full . . . The paramedics finally told Childrens Hospital that they had to take Paige . . . That’s where we went.”

Billy said the next 24 hours were both encouraging and terrifying.

Before Paige underwent preliminary examinations, emergency doctors told Billy and Emily that their daughter might have suffered minimal brain damage.

Miraculously, tests showed Paige had survived with no brain damage, and Paige continued to show improvement. Soon, Billy said the toddler was awake and walking around as if nothing had happened. Paige was released from the hospital only three days after the incident.

Doctor Calvin Lowe, the emergency room doctor who first saw Paige, believes it was Billy’s quick thinking that saved her life.

“The dad knew CPR which was great,” Lowe said. “The sooner you start getting oxygen back into the blood going to the brain, within four to six minutes, that’s where you’re going to minimize any brain damage . . . Dad is really the hero . . . He’s the one who saved the child from any further damage.”

Billy believes divine intervention saved his daughter.

“It’s changed me spiritually because the medical community said, ‘She should have been in a coma . . . she should have had brain damage.’ But she doesn’t . . . Something else was going on here.”

Billy recalls his 3-year-old son, Seth, telling Emily that he knew everything was going to be okay because he could see “an angel standing next to daddy the entire time.”

Billy said his watch— which had faithfully worked for four years—had stopped that night at exactly 6:55 p.m., the approximate time of the accident.

As a teenager, Billy ran with a dangerous crowd and grew up living on and off the street. And even though he’s no stranger to tough situations, he said finding his daughter that night was the “most horrifying” experience of his life.

“No one should ever have to go through what I went through that night. No one,” Billy said.

With the incident behind them, the couple has since “baby proofed” the house.

A screen with a motion-sensor alarm now encircles the pool and other baby-friendly amenities secure the home.

The trauma of the event has begun to fade, but the medical bills are just now starting to pile up.

Billy, a welder, said Emily lost her job as a clerical worker in the days following the accident and their insurance has run out.

Even though they haven’t received all hospital bills, Billy estimates the medical costs to be around $10,000.

Billy is scheduled to depart to Baton Rouge, La. in the coming weeks to work as a volunteer with the Red Cross in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He said he will be there for at least two months.

Billy and Emily, who have been married for eight months, share an Agoura Hills home with Billy’s parents and his three children, Paige, Seth and Gage, 16.