Mum 'haunted' by son's near-drowning

With a spike in the number of drownings this summer, one mum who will always be vigilant around the water is Alice Bartlett, who came terrifyingly close to losing her toddler son in a backyard pool accident eight years ago.

Alice’s son Jaidyn, who is now 12 years old, was playing by the pool at the family home in Narwee, NSW, on December 12 2009, when he fell in and sank to the bottom.

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Mother-of-eight Alice’s heart stopped when she saw her precious boy’s tennis racquet floating on the top and a dark shadow at the bottom of the pool. She immediately jumped in, grabbing Jaidyn’s arm and pulling her “grey and lifeless” son from the water.

And while eight years on, 12-year-old Jaidyn may be completely unharmed by the freak accident, Alice is still plagued with guilt, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder over the events of the day.

“I was racked with the guilt for a really long time because my thought around the swimming pool was ‘It won’t ever happen to me’ and it did happen to me and it changed my whole entire world,” Alice told Be.

It was two weeks before Christmas and the family had just moved into a new home so they were rearranging boxes the day Jaidyn disappeared in a matter of seconds.

Alice and her mum, Stephanie, were wondering where he had got to when Alice suddenly glanced at the pool, which was covered in a thick layer of algae.

“Mother’s intuition I suppose kicked in and sort of said ‘get in the swimming pool’ and he was in there,” she said.

"I didn’t know it was him. I just saw a shadow in there and then I jumped in and put my arm in and grabbed his arm and pulled him out," she said.

After being dragged out of the pool, Jaidyn was gurgling with his eyes rolled into the back of his head and as Alice’s mother started doing CPR, she frantically dialed 000.

“He was lifeless. He was gone," Alice said.

“I don’t even know how long he was in the swimming pool for because I suppose you automatically expect to hear the splash. I didn’t even hear any of that. It was just nothing, just silence.”

Luckily, there was a paramedic at the end of the street who heard the call on his speaker and came straight there.

“If that paramedic officer didn’t happen to have his stereo on I don’t know if we’d still have Jaidyn today,” she said.

Alice said it felt like a lifetime before the ambulance finally arrived at the home to take Jaidyn to St George Hospital, where he was placed in a drug-induced coma.

The devastated mother stood by as her son was “poked and prodded” with needles before he was transferred to Randwick Children’s Hospital, where his body temperature was dropped to 17 degrees on a cooling bed.

"When you touched him it was like he was dead but his heart monitor was going," she said.

After a week in hospital, Jaidyn woke up and showed no signs of being traumatised by the accident.

“When I got to him all he could say was ‘Mum, can I go for a swim?’,” she said.

“I was like, ‘You’re never going into that swimming pool ever again’.”

Jaidyn was back at home within a week of the accident and to his mother’s horror, he jumped straight back into the pool alongside his brothers.

“I had to go upstairs and just lock myself away and cry and make sure they were watching him because I couldn’t watch it,” she said.

Now, eight years later, Jaidyn may have come out unscathed by what happened and loves to spend time in the water, but Alice says she still has nightmares about the day her toddler nearly died.

“I’m the one that has the major fear and anxiety when it comes to the water,” she said.

“My heart still stops when we go to the beach or river or swimming pools even though all my sons know how to swim.”

For Alice, it’s been a daily struggle to overcome the pain and guilt she felt that day and it’s only in the past year she’s been able to start talk about how it affected her.

“My heart breaks for the mums and dads who have to bury their babies. I got to bring mine home and my heart is still broken,” she said.

“This time of the year scares me because everything just reminds me of it.

“Whenever I hear of another baby drowning it just brings it all back and breaks my heart all over again."

When December 12th rolls around, Alice and her family spend their time indoors playing board games with the pool totally off limits.

“The 12th of December is a really bad day,” Alice said.

“It’s the day my heart broke and never fully healed.”

And while Jaidyn has little recollection of the day, Alice says the teenager tends to get a bit sombre around this time of the year.

"Even he gets a bit sad around this time of the year because he knows how much our hearts broke when that happened to him," she said.

After everything that’s happened, Alice says she pleads with parents to never believe it won't happen to them.

"Don’t sit there and think it won’t happen to you because it very well could," she said.

“Don’t sit there and think because they’ve got all the swimming training in the world that they’re going to survive it because sometimes they don’t."

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