Scottish lawmaker used first aid to save daughter's life after she choked on a coin
Alex Cole-Hamilton says he's made it his mission to boost first aid training
Alex Cole-Hamilton was just about to head out the door Saturday night when his four-year-old daughter's "strangled cry" stopped him in his tracks.
The member of Scottish Parliament whipped around, ran past the babysitter, and found his little girl Darcy turning blue in the face.
"She managed to get out the words, 'Swallowed a penny,'" Cole-Hamilton told As It Happens host Carol Off.
Immediately, he said, the first aid training he thought was long forgotten kicked in.
"At that point, it wasn't so much fear or terror. It was just complete focus and commitment to getting her to breathe again," he said.
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He tilted the child over his knee so she was bent forward and gave her five strong open-handed claps on the back until she vomited — as recommended by St. John Ambulance, an international organization that provides first aid and emergency medicine training.
The half-euro coin didn't come out, but it apparently shifted enough that Darcy finally gasped for air.
'You did the right thing'
"She was retching and gagging, but I could see she was breathing," he said. "I was asking, 'Can you breathe? Can you breathe?' And she started to nod."
Then he called an ambulance.
Darcy was rushed to hospital where doctors put her under anesthetic and removed the coin with forceps. She is now recovering and doing just fine, Cole-Hamilton said.
"What they said to me in the ambulance is, 'You did the right thing.' And, in fact, they said, 'If you hadn't done that, it would have been a very different outcome,'" he said.
"I am just emotional about that."
Advocating for first aid
Cole-Hamilton said he can't help but wonder what would have happened if he'd left just a few minutes earlier that night.
"I could go mad thinking about all the things that could have happened and I'm just trying to focus on the fact that we've got our beautiful, happy daughter back where she belongs in our house and she's safe," he said.
"The other thing that's been really playing on our mind is so many friends who've been really kind and giving us good wishes and visiting and the rest, so many of them had said, 'I wouldn't know what to do.'"
Now the Scottish lawmaker — the Liberal Democrat member for Edinburgh Western — is on a mission to encourage anyone and everyone to get basic first aid training.
He's even pushing for it to be part of the Scottish school curriculum.
"It's so easy to get that training and it's like 20 minutes of your life to learn a skill — a very easy skill, actually — that could save someone's life," he said.
"Because of my job, I've got a bit of attention ... right now, and I'm going to use that to try and build awareness."
Cole-Hamilton said he took first aid training more than 25 years ago, when he was a teenager learning to scuba dive, and he had no idea he'd retained the lessons after all these years.
"This was brought home to me on Saturday night. Somebody may teach you how to do something that you may not need for the rest of your life, or you may need it in 30 years time," he said.
"But if it's there at the back of your brain, it's amazing how swiftly you can remember it."
Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview produced by Sarah-Joyce Battersby.