A single mother in Wales faced a horrific selection to save lots of her toddler after being told she’d should wait eight hours for an ambulance for her unconscious son.
Georgia Faith Johnson, 26, told BBC “Radio Wales Breakfast” she called for help after Tobias, 2, began seizing at their Cardiff home.
The teen, who suffered febrile convulsions previously, collapsed and turned pale, his eyes rolling back in his head, she recounted.
The dispatcher told her to “’get to the hospital immediately’” — but that there was an eight-hour wait for ambulances, she recalled.
Johnson described how she put Tobias into the automobile and sped toward the emergency room, but quickly got stuck in traffic.
“As I turned to have a look at my son, unfortunately he was pretty lifeless,” she said. “He was floppy and the colour was drained from his lips and all of his face.”
She said she again tried to call emergency services, and was told to put the little boy flat and track his respiration for signs of cardiac arrest.
“At this point I used to be just crying and begging, ‘Please just send an ambulance,’ to which she was responding it might still be a five-hour wait a minimum of,” the distraught mother said. “The decision handler said he would probably give you the chance to listen to me, so I used to be attempting to stay calm.”
Johnson said she pulled right into a bus lane, where a bystander helped her move Tobias out of the automobile. They were eventually joined by two other passersby — an off-duty fireman who tried to rally his colleagues into motion, and a girl trained in first aid who placed the toddler on his side in a recovery position.
Even so, it was an hour before an ambulance in traffic spotted the group and drove them to the hospital.
“They were amazing. They jumped straight into motion,” Johnson said of the nice Samaritans.
Tobias was sedated for nearly a complete day before being discharged, the mom said, adding he’s prescribed medication that ought to quell the seizures but can even decelerate his respiration — and possibly require medical intervention.
The potential for one other ambulance call is now never removed from Johnson’s mind, as cuts to the UK’s National Health Service make emergency response delays increasingly common.
“What’s really scary is, if I lived in a rural area and really couldn’t get him into the automobile and waited those eight hours, my son would have been dead,” she lamented.
“To think that what happened to my son and I is taking a look at becoming the norm in Wales is just incredibly sad and worrying. Not only for people like us but for the staff of the NHS too who’re working under immense pressure because it is.”
Johnson’s story comes at an increasingly unstable national moment, as Prime Minister Liz Truss’ resignation leaves the country in limbo while staring down a growing cost-of-living crisis.
A single mother in Wales faced a horrific selection to save lots of her toddler after being told she’d should wait eight hours for an ambulance for her unconscious son.
Georgia Faith Johnson, 26, told BBC “Radio Wales Breakfast” she called for help after Tobias, 2, began seizing at their Cardiff home.
The teen, who suffered febrile convulsions previously, collapsed and turned pale, his eyes rolling back in his head, she recounted.
The dispatcher told her to “’get to the hospital immediately’” — but that there was an eight-hour wait for ambulances, she recalled.
Johnson described how she put Tobias into the automobile and sped toward the emergency room, but quickly got stuck in traffic.
“As I turned to have a look at my son, unfortunately he was pretty lifeless,” she said. “He was floppy and the colour was drained from his lips and all of his face.”
She said she again tried to call emergency services, and was told to put the little boy flat and track his respiration for signs of cardiac arrest.
“At this point I used to be just crying and begging, ‘Please just send an ambulance,’ to which she was responding it might still be a five-hour wait a minimum of,” the distraught mother said. “The decision handler said he would probably give you the chance to listen to me, so I used to be attempting to stay calm.”
Johnson said she pulled right into a bus lane, where a bystander helped her move Tobias out of the automobile. They were eventually joined by two other passersby — an off-duty fireman who tried to rally his colleagues into motion, and a girl trained in first aid who placed the toddler on his side in a recovery position.
Even so, it was an hour before an ambulance in traffic spotted the group and drove them to the hospital.
“They were amazing. They jumped straight into motion,” Johnson said of the nice Samaritans.
Tobias was sedated for nearly a complete day before being discharged, the mom said, adding he’s prescribed medication that ought to quell the seizures but can even decelerate his respiration — and possibly require medical intervention.
The potential for one other ambulance call is now never removed from Johnson’s mind, as cuts to the UK’s National Health Service make emergency response delays increasingly common.
“What’s really scary is, if I lived in a rural area and really couldn’t get him into the automobile and waited those eight hours, my son would have been dead,” she lamented.
“To think that what happened to my son and I is taking a look at becoming the norm in Wales is just incredibly sad and worrying. Not only for people like us but for the staff of the NHS too who’re working under immense pressure because it is.”
Johnson’s story comes at an increasingly unstable national moment, as Prime Minister Liz Truss’ resignation leaves the country in limbo while staring down a growing cost-of-living crisis.
