So-called "secondary drowning" has become a concern among parents of small children after the mother of a 2-year-old wrote a viral blog post about her son's brush with the rare but potentially deadly affliction.
Lindsay Kujawa, 28,
wrote on her "Delighted Momma" blog in late May about her son Ronin, who fell into a spa at their house in Murrieta, California. Kujawa got to him within seconds, pulling him up from the water as he sputtered and coughed up a little bit of water. After a short cry, he recovered, and went back to playing.
Roughly an hour later, however, he began acting uncharacteristically woozy, and began coughing again.
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"You know what your child is like when he’s tired and this was totally different," she wrote,
according to NBC's "Today" show.
After talking to his pediatrician on the phone, Kujawa and her husband rushed Ronin to the emergency room, where medical technicians found fluid in his lungs.
The fluid created a condition commonly known as nonfatal drowning or "secondary drowning," which is similar to pneumonia.
"It can happen if water from a pool gets into your lungs, but also if you aspirate a piece of food or vomit," said Dr. Mark Morocco, a professor of emergency medicine at the Reagan UCLA Medical Center, in his appearance on "Today."
"The important thing for parents to remember is that any time your child has trouble breathing and it lasts longer than expected and the child begins to behave in a bizarre way, you need to go to the ER."
Lethargy, coughing after the event is over, erratic behavior, a change in the color of the lips, or a change in breathing may be a signal that secondary drowning has occurred.
"The pediatrician told us the next day that we were fortunate we didn’t put him down to sleep," said Kujawa. "Sometimes kids die and the parents don’t know what happened to their kid. They just don’t wake up. That’s terrifying."
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