“A young mother is looking to use the most traumatic experience of her life as an opportunity to raise awareness.
‘I told God if he would give me my boy back I would do what I could to work through him and He is telling me that I need to spread awareness of knowledge of CPR and water safety,’ Kate Abbott said.
Abbott, a nurse at Lumberton Health and Rehabilitation, learned CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, about 10 years ago while she was at East Carolina University meeting requirements to be a certified nursing assistant. Since then she has administered CPR on about six people while working in the hospital and in long-term care facilities.
It was 11 days ago that Abbott’s 2-year-old son, Carter, became her patient after he nearly drowned in a swimming pool.
The incident happened Aug. 8 at a family gathering just over the Robeson County line in Bladen County. Abbott said there were 20 or more people at the party, half of them adults and half children.
‘Everybody was having a good time,’ she said.
Carter and other children had been playing in the pool, Abbott said. Once they finished, she placed him back in his street clothes and left him to play in the front yard with other children. Soon afterward her mother’s intuition kicked in.
‘Something told me “You need lay your eyes on your boy,”’ Abbott said. ‘I had just seen him a few minutes earlier, but I just got this notion over me that I needed to see him.
‘I didn’t have this feeling of impending doom. I just needed to look at him.'”
View the whole story here: https://www.robesonian.com/news/137062/mother-embraces-cpr-mission-after-son-nearly-drowns