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Mum's warning after car seat suffocates baby
A mum is speaking out after her newborn baby was left foaming at the mouth and stopped breathing after a two-hour journey in a car seat caused oxygen deprivation.
After spending a day out with their two daughters, Kirsti Clark, 28, and husband Christopher, 29, were caught in peak-hour traffic on the way home but didn’t think too much of the two-hour trip.
But when they got home and popped three-week-old Harper, who had been in her car seat for the whole journey, on her play mat the baby’s lips turned blue, her jaw clenched shut and white foam started frothing out of her nose and mouth.
“My husband got Harper out and put her on his knee but she looked like she couldn’t get comfy so he laid her down on her mat and she was kicking about,” Kirsti said.
“I told him her lips looked blue and then he pointed out how red her cheeks were. He picked her up and I could tell straight away from his face that something was wrong.
“It was so scary. My husband was holding her and patting her back and I was trying to get her mouth open to make sure she didn’t swallow her tongue but her jaw was clenched shut," she said.
The couple, from Scotland, quickly grabbed their three-year-old Malena and raced Harper to hospital – a five-minute journey that felt like a lifetime for Kirsti who was convinced she was going to lose her baby.
“The car journey was horrendous. I was trying to make sure she was breathing but I was shaking so much I couldn’t tell,” the mum said.
“My husband kept asking if she was breathing and I just had to say ‘I don’t know’.
“She kept closing her eyes and I was trying to keep her awake but then they would glaze over. My wee girl was so panicked as well.
“The whole way there all I could think was ‘we are going to lose her’. I can’t even talk about it without getting upset.”
By the time they arrived at the hospital, Kirsti was hysterical and crying. Thankfully medics were able to resuscitate Harper, who had suffered a seizure.
“Then the tears really started so they let me have a cuddle before they started doing tests to find out what had caused it,” she said.
“Seeing her like that was the worst feeling. It was horrid. I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.”
A consultant then warned the parents that spending more than one hour in a car seat can cause babies’ oxygen levels to plummet.
During their day out parents Kirsti and Christopher set out for an afternoon of shopping with their girls at 2:30pm and did a 45-minute drive to a shopping centre where they spent almost three hours with Harper in her pram.
The family then did a ten-minute drive to look at bunkbeds where Kirsti walked around with Harper as the baby had just had a feed.
At around 6:30pm they set off on the drive home which took around one hour and 45 minutes and Harper spent a further 15 minutes in her car seat while mum and dad got Malena into bed.
Spending two hours in her car seat caused such severe oxygen deprivation that when Harper was taken out and lay down, the sudden increase sent her body into shock causing the baby to fit.
Now Kirsti is determined to share what happened to her baby girl as they had never heard that such a short time in a completely safe car seat could have such dire consequences.
“When the consultant told us it was the car seat I couldn’t believe it. I thought ‘there’s no way’. I couldn’t understand why nobody had ever told us,” Kirsti said.
“After we got my head around that being the reason, Christopher and I felt so angry at ourselves – we felt like we did this to our baby. It was horrendous.
“But we’ve spoken to so many people and they had never heard about it either and then some people have conflicting opinions on the time.
“That’s why we knew we had to share what happened to Harper because parents need to know. Just two hours in a car seat and we could have lost her, it’s terrifying.”
The Lullaby Trust, a charity which funds research on infant deaths, carried out a study using a motion simulator to explore the effects on babies spending prolonged periods of time in car seats in 2016.
“Simulating motion reveals a striking increase in potentially clinically significant oxygen desaturations. Surprisingly these differences were similar in term and preterm infants,” the study concluded.
With additional reporting by Caters News.
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