SANTA CRUZ (Feb, 2009) -- Living near Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, Erin Dawn was often awoken by the sound of medical transport helicopters churning through the still, dark sky. She never imagined that one night it would be her own son taking that fateful ride. But on October 11, 2008, it was 9-year-old Aidan Dawn being rushed from the emergency room to a waiting air ambulance for transport to Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
Due to weight restrictions, Aidan’s parents weren’t allowed to ride along, so for the first time in six hours Dawn tore herself away from her child’s side. “That was very painful,” she recalls in an anguished voice. “But I had to let go, surrender, and trust that he would make it there.”
Erin and her husband, Chazz, could only watch helplessly as the helicopter circled and disappeared into the darkness, racing towards Aidan’s only hope of survival.
A Birthday Party Ends in Tragedy
Children’s laughter floated up from the sunny shore. Aidan’s best friend, Alfred “Pippin” Seales, was celebrating his 11th birthday with a party at Natural Bridges State Beach. While parents gathered at a picnic site, children raced across the warm sand. Pippin and Aidan, ever the adventurers, explored a narrow cave that had worked its way into a sandy hillside.
“My 6-year-old son Rainer and two other little girls were outside the cave when it collapsed,” Dawn explains, speaking slowly to check her emotions. “Rainer sent one of the girls to get help while he stayed and tried to dig his brother out. She said, ‘The cave fell down,’ so I asked ‘Are they okay?’ She said, ‘They’re moving their feet’ and that’s when we started running.”
Arriving at the scene, Dawn saw only her son’s feet and a sliver of black jeans sticking out of the jumbled sand. Working frantically with another parent, she was able to pull him out. “He wasn’t breathing and had a very gray look,” she says, fighting back tears. “I thought he was dead and felt, Oh no, too late! But I remember deciding, No, I can’t let this be it.”
While others furiously dug for Pippin, Dawn began resuscitating her son. (An acupuncturist, trained as a mid-wife and medical assistant, Dawn now advises every parent to take CPR.) As she labored over her ashen child, the first of many angels arrived in the form of a fellow beachgoer who happened to be a doctor. Encouraged by the doctor’s discovery of a faint pulse, Dawn continued forcing air into her son’s mouth. Although his color started changing, Aidan’s blank, unfocused eyes had Dawn worried about possible brain damage.
“I heard the ambulance come up and then a paramedic put an oxygen mask on Aidan,” Dawn continues. “That was the first time Aidan tried to move and I sensed that he was still here. The paramedic was using a small suctioning tube to get the sand out and Aidan gasped, ‘I can’t breathe.’ It was a huge relief because it was a completely coherent sentence.”
Dawn would soon learn that Aidan was suffering from sand aspiration, a rare but life-threatening condition in which extensive sand, gravel or dirt is ingested deeply into the throat and lungs. Most common due to industrial accidents, the sand obstructs the trachea and bronchi, suffocating the patient. Tragically, this is what happened to Pippin, who in spite of the heroic efforts of his would-be rescuers, was buried for more than ten minutes. But racing to Dominican Hospital in the ambulance, Dawn knew only that she needed to keep her hands on her son, repeating, “Stay here. Stay with me.”
Once in the emergency room, it was touch and go as doctors tried to stabilize Aidan for transport to Stanford. When they tried to intubate him, inserting a tube down the trachea to help him breath, it came back out filled with sand. At one point, Aidan started inflating like a balloon due to air leaks between the lungs and the chest wall. X-rays revealed a double pneumothorax, or collapsed lungs. A surgeon, who happened to be in the emergency room, inserted chest tubes to release the air, successfully averting yet another crisis.
Aidan was finally wheeled out to the helipad just after eleven o’clock. The helicopter roared to life and lifted off, leaving Erin and Chazz shivering on the tarmac below.
A Risky Procedure is Aidan’s Only Hope
Stanford had a team of highly skilled experts awaiting Aidan’s arrival. A search of the medical literature had revealed very few cases of sand aspiration victims surviving. However, it had been successfully treated in adults by placing the patient on a heart and lung bypass machine while the lungs were flushed. While performing the rare procedure on a seriously injured child would be extremely risky, it was Aidan’s only hope.
“Everyone recognized how critical Aidan was,” recalls John Mark, Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Pulmonary Medicine at Stanford Medical School. “He was right on the edge where he might not have survived in another hour or two.”
The early hours of Sunday morning passed in a flurry of complications as the team tried to prep Aidan for surgery. They discovered a dangerous tear in his trachea which complicated an already complex situation. As soon as the doctors solved one crisis, another arose. Throughout it all, Dawn kept her hands on her son, talking quietly to him amidst the chaos.
Once Aidan was hooked up to the bypass machine, ear, nose and throat specialist Dr. Peter Koltai inserted a small metal tube into Aidan’s lungs to flush out the sand. “He had such a huge amount of debris in his airways,” Mark recalls. “Pieces of shell and twigs as well as sand. It was pretty amazing.”
With his airways clear, the plan was to keep Aidan on the heart and lung bypass until they could get his lungs functioning again. But there’s a time limit for how long a person can stay on bypass before life-threatening complications set in. As the sun was rising over Palo Alto, Dr. Koltai told Erin and Chazz, “This machine has saved your son’s life. Now it’s becoming his worst enemy.”
The Santa Cruz Community Waits and Worries
Meanwhile, back in Santa Cruz, friends and family were processing the double blow of Pippin’s death and Aidan’s struggle to survive.
On Monday morning, Maria Fahrner, the children’s Independent Study Teacher at Mountain School, began calling other families in the home-school program. “Many had been at the birthday party,” she explains. “Some knew about what had happened. Others had already left before the accident occurred. I was giving them news that would change their lives and the lives of their children forever.”
On Tuesday, the school called in experts to help them process their grief. At one point, the students stood in a circle with their parents surrounding them. The first child held the end of a ball of string and, looking around at his friends, shared a memory of Pippin and a wish for Aidan’s recovery. He tossed the ball to a second child who, in a quiet, brave voice, did the same. One by one, the children shared, laughed, and cried as the web of string connecting them grew stronger and more complex.
“That is a very beautiful, healing memory,” Fahrner recalls. “Processing it together like that was so important. Being there for each other in a space where Pippin and Aidan had been a part of everything.”
In the days that followed, the children created a memorial for Pippin in the classroom and wrote cards and letters for Aidan. The parents organized a meal schedule for Dawn and Chazz and helped with Rainer, who was being cared for by relatives. People at Chazz’s work, Specialized Bicycle, sent letters and care packages. A spontaneous memorial sprung up at Natural Bridges, where flowers, cards and stuffed animals stood sentinel on the windswept hill above the destroyed cave.
But the outpouring of support wasn’t limited to those who knew Aidan. Something about the accident had touched people everywhere. Who hasn’t been to a party at the beach and smiled at the sight of children happily digging in the sand, sunshine warming their bare shoulders? “They weren’t anywhere near the water,” mothers whispered to one another, shaking their heads. “It could have been any of us,” fathers agreed with a shudder. Soon, thanks to the World Wide Web, the boys’ story had spread around the globe, creating a flood of response.
“We received money to go towards Aidan’s medical bills and so many cards!” Dawn says. “I put every single one of them up on the wall of his room. I found out that many people were praying for Aidan. It just sort of spread through church groups and e-mails. I’m not a religious person, but I’m so grateful because I do believe that prayer can affect a positive outcome. We were deeply touched by the outpouring of support.”
Integrative Medicine Hastens Aidan’s Recovery
On Monday evening, Aidan was successfully removed from the heart-lung bypass machine. Tuesday morning he regained consciousness but remained on a ventilator, which kept him from speaking. Dawn saw him shakily moving his right hand and thought he was trying to point at something. Then a perceptive nurse said, “He’s doing sign language.”
“He had taken sign language in preschool,” Dawn says with a relieved laugh. “He was signing D-A-D. I asked if he wanted to know where daddy was and he nodded. That was a hallelujah moment! He was still Aidan. He was still here.”
Throughout the day, Aidan struggled to communicate with his parents and care providers. A nurse made out a list of letters and words for him to point to. He drew a cave with little stick figures and kept pointing to one figure. He wanted to know what had happened to Pippin. Dawn, worried that he was too fragile, promised they would talk about the accident when he was stronger.
Over the next week Aidan improved by small increments. He had problems with his kidney function, perplexing tremors, and partial paralysis on his life side. He developed pneumonia. He was given a medication to solve one problem and then another to deal with the side-effects from the first. Even though it was a roller coaster, it was a generally upward trend.
“Everyone was thrilled with his progress,” Dawn says. “It’s a teaching hospital so doctors are always coming around and after a while you could tell the doctors were just coming by to boost their morale. A nurse came up to me and said, ‘I’ve seen a few miracles in my time here and your son is one of them.’”
With Aidan finally stable, Dawn turned to her own training as a healer. Aidan was in a lot of pain, which was causing him anxiety so he couldn’t take a deep breath. With the blessing of his doctors, Dawn asked an osteopath, a care provider that manipulates the musculoskeletal system, to work on him. He discovered that the weight of the sand had pushed Aidan’s ribs in on a nerve plexus long his spine, causing much of his pain and anxiety.
“As soon as the osteopath released that, and did some work on his lungs, Aidan relaxed and started taking deeper breaths. He didn’t need any more pain medication. It was an amazing transformation,” Dawn says. “They could take him off the oxygen, so he was more mobile.”
Dawn also focused on nutrition, feeding Aidan homemade chicken soup, protein powder, cod liver oil, and homeopathic constitutional remedies. Gradually she would add probiotics, Chinese herbs, and supplements to strengthen and repair his lungs.
“In my experience, children and adults tend to recover more quickly and need less pain medication when you supplement with alternative therapies” says Dr. Mark, who has completed a medical fellowship at the University of Arizona with Andrew Weil, one of the country’s leading proponents of integrative medicine. “Most physicians these days aren’t threatened by other modalities. They’re looking for things to help, not replace, Western medicine.”
Finally, after eleven days in the pediatric intensive care unit, Aidan was released from the hospital. The day before, the family had told him about Pippin’s death.
“He said he knew,” Dawn shares sadly. “He intuitively sensed it. Later he said that Pippin had been in the hospital with him.”
A Community Comes Together in Grief and Gratitude
Pippin’s memorial service was Saturday, October 25, exactly two weeks after the accident. Aidan rode his bike.
“When Aidan came in, everybody was really heartened,” Fahrner says. “I think Aidan’s recovery helped all of us deal with our grief over losing Pippin.”
Today, with a mop of auburn hair framing his smiling face, Aidan looks and acts like any other healthy, active, third grader. He’s off all medications. He works regularly with an osteopath and continues with nutritional supplements. He’s also had several sessions with a psychotherapist to help heal the emotional trauma. Although he hasn’t regained all of his strength, Aidan likes to ski and has a “voracious appetite” for mountain biking.
“When I saw Aidan in late December he looked absolutely wonderful,” Dr. Mark confirms. “His lung exam and function numbers were all normal. There weren’t even signs of his past history of asthma.”
According to Fahrner, both Pippin and Aidan have been an inspiration to their classmates. “He and Aidan were very similar. They were both so joyful in their love of life and learning. They were interested in everything – science, nature, art, games, history. A lot of the students mention things that Pippin used to do that they want to do now. We miss Pippin, but we carry him with us. And they appreciate Aidan so much. There’s a sense of gratitude on a kid level that is lovely to see.”
Even Pippin’s grieving parents have been a source of support for Aidan and his family. “They’re incredible people,” Dawn declares with tears in her eyes. “They’re bearing the unbearable with amazing strength and grace. They’ve had Aidan and Pippin’s other friends over to their house many times. In spite of their pain, they have made the choice to honor their son by living life.”
Looking back, there were many factors that contributed to Aidan’s recovery. He was healthy going into the accident. He had excellent medical care, both traditional and alternative. He had the emotional support of friends and strangers, and luck frequently played in his favor. But according to Fahrner, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Erin saved Aidan’s life. I’m sure she downplays her role, but Erin is a healer. She was there for him 100%, putting every ounce of energy into his recovery. Something deeper was at work.”
“Aidan still talks about Pippin a lot,” Dawn concludes. “He was a little depressed for a while after the accident, but one morning he said, 'Mom I had the best Pippin dream last night. We were in this labyrinth and we were finding all these treasures together and Pippin told me he was fine.’ After that, something shifted. He still misses his best friend, but he seemed happier knowing that Pippin was okay.”
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