Car seats these days have so many safety regulations, so you’d think that your baby would be safe sitting in it. One Scottish mother is warning parents that this isn’t the case.
Her newborn suffered from oxygen deprivation and was foaming at the mouth after sitting in a car seat for two hours.
Kirsti Clark and her husband Christopher Clark were on the road and made sure to take the 3-week-old baby out of the car seat every time they stopped.
They got stuck in some traffic on the way home. They arrived home safely and Kirsti took her baby Harper out of the seat to play on her mat.
She could tell there was something wrong with the baby.
“When we got home it was way past Malena’s bedtime so brought Harper in in her car seat and she stayed in there for 15 minutes as we got Malena into bed,” Kirsti recalled, according to the Daily Record.
“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. I told him her lips looked blue and then he pointed out how red her cheeks were.”
The baby’s lips turned blue. She then clenched her draw and started foaming at the mouth and nose.
They could tell that something wasn’t right.
“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,” Kirsti recalled. “It wasn’t like a normal seizure, she was arching her back and throwing her head back.”
The ride to the hospital was a truly traumatizing experience.
“The car journey was horrendous. I was trying to make sure she was breathing but I was shaking so much I couldn’t tell. My husband kept asking if she was breathing and I just had to say ‘I don’t know,'” she recalls.
“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.”
Thankfully the hospital staff was able to get the baby breathing again. The baby was going to recover just fine.
She later learned the cause of her daughter’s episode.
She suffered from severe oxygen deprivation after spending two hours in her car seat. When she was taken out and laid down, the increase in oxygen shocked her body causing a seizure.
The doctors told her that babies who spend more than an hour in the car can suffer from oxygen deprivation.
She was shocked to learn this and even more shocked to learn that she wasn’t the only parent who was unaware of this.
“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. We had obviously heard about not keeping babies in car seats overnight because it causes curvature of the spine but not about anything like this,” she said.
Now Kirsti wants to warn other parents about what she went through.
“I would tell every parent to just really carefully watch their babies and if they don’t absolutely need to be in the car seat take them out because it is not worth what we had to go through,” she said.
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