OCEANSIDE (CBS 8) - A one-year-old boy is recovering at Rady Children's Hospital after nearly drowning in a pool in Oceanside. And it's the quick actions of his nanny that saved him.
“The nightmare phone call you don't ever want to get.”
Karen Clark had no time to change out of her UCSD nursing scrubs when she got that call.
Her nanny had just told her that her one-year-old son Gabriel had nearly drowned.
“She quickly took him out, he was blue and not breathing,” Clark said.
Gabriel was with his four-year-old sister and their nanny at a neighbor's pool in Oceanside when it happened in an instant.
He was in a flotation device but at around 3:30 in the afternoon, the nanny just turned her back for a few seconds.
That's when Gabriel tried to get out of his floatie.
“He was in a floaty thing, where your feet are in the water and you're kind of supported and he just tried to get out...he wasn't totally out, but his head was submerged,” Clark said.
Quickly, the 22-year-old nanny took Gabriel out of the water and put her CPR training to use.
“She administered CPR and had her phone so she called 911, the paramedics came, and then she called me. I am very thankful how she went about things,” Clark said.
It's the sixth near drowning reported by Rady Children's Hospital in just the past two days.
“Very alarming but actually not unusual,” Rady Chidren's Hospital nurse, Oseana Bratton said.
With more children playing in the pool this summer near drownings are far too common. Hospital workers say in general the water accidents will happen in the blink of an eye.
“Parents look away for a moment, that child finds a body of water and they get in there. They love the water,” Bratton said.
Karen Clark says her nanny's CPR training may have saved Gabriel's life. But she says there may not be a chance for more water accidents.
“I'll have to look into exactly what other kind of vest to put him in, but to be honest, we're not going in the pool,” Clark said.
Experts say drowning is a leading cause of death among children between one and four years old.