Positivity: ‘That Girl Saved His Life’
Sunday, January 13, 2008
The 13-minute 911 call begins: “My dad fell down the stairs, and I don’t know what to do.”
The voice belongs to 6-year-old Kaylee Torrance who’s talking to a Warren County 911 operator on Dec. 17. Kaylee’s father, David, 42, a diabetic, is unconscious, lying on his side, bleeding, and she has no idea why.
A few minutes earlier — like any school day — Kaylee and her 4-year-old sister Taylor are dressing and waiting for their father to drive them to school, Kaylee to Hunter Elementary, Taylor to preschool.
Then the girls hear a loud noise coming from the top floor of the family’s tri-level home. Taylor walks to the second level and sees her father lying at the bottom of the stairs. She races downstairs and alerts her sister.
Kaylee, a first-grader, runs to her father’s side. Kaylee can’t tell if he’s breathing, and Taylor thinks her father is dead.
Kaylee knows her mother, Lora, is a nurse at Willow Knoll Retirement Community, but she doesn’t know the phone number.
Then Kaylee remembers a conversation she had just two months earlier with her mother. Lora told Kaylee that if David, a diabetic for 15 years, ever fell and needed medical assistance — and Lora wasn’t home — she should call 911.
“Daddy, please get up. He fell down the stairs and he’s bleeding bad.”
“There is an ambulance coming. You did a fantastic job calling 911. Can you unlock the door for me?”
The operator tells Kaylee to look at her father’s lips. She asks if they’re pink or blue.
“They’re the color they always are.”
And what about the color of his finger tips?
“There is a little blood on one of them.”
The operator again congratulates Kaylee and tells her the ambulance is on its way from Franklin.
She asks Kaylee if her dad is breathing. Kaylee misunderstands the question.
“His head is bleeding a little.”
Kaylee is asked if she can place her hand on her father’s back and see if it’s moving.
“It’s moving. I think he’s snoring, too.”
Then there’s another voice on the 911 tape. That of Kaylee’s little sister.
“I don’t want him to die.”
Kaylee earns her Big Sister Badge.
“It’ll be OK, Taylor.”
A neighbor, whom Lora called from work, arrives, and is instructed by the 911 operator to feel for a pulse on the side of David’s neck. He has a pulse.
He’s transported to Atrium Medical Center, and is hospitalized for six hours. Medics tell Torrance his blood-sugar level is less than 20, a dangerous level.
“If it was not for her quick thinking, there is a high chance that he would not be alive today,” said Lt. Andy Hamilton of the Joint Emergency Medical Service.
Three weeks after the accident, David Torrance isn’t sure what happened. He remembers taking his daily insulin shot, brushing his teeth, then feeling light-headed.
He woke up in an ambulance.
….. And what if David had collapsed, and his girls — his “little angels” — hadn’t been home that morning?
“It would have been in God’s hands,” he said.
Behind his back, his wife moved her hand like she was slitting her throat.
“That girl,” Lora said, “saved his life.”
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