In July 2009, Shauna Meekin asked her adolescent son to watch her toddler, Christian. At four months pregnant, she was feeling grumpy and needed to lie down.
She recalls: “I close my eyes, and the next thing I know my son came running into the bedroom, frantic, and said, ‘Mom, Christian got outside!’”
Christian, who couldn’t yet walk, had crawled through the doggie door and into the pool. When the paramedics rushed in, Christian’s body was limp, Meekin says.
“He was gone. He was dead.”
But in the hospital, Christian regained a pulse. Unfortunately, he is not the same child he once was—today, he eats through a tube.
Meekin hopes to educate other parents about Infant Swimming Resource, a 46-year-old program that aims to prevent pediatric drowning through instruction to children as young as 6 months. CrossFit Kids has partnered with the program, and Meekin’s youngest child is enrolled in ISR classes.
“I am sure, without a shadow of a doubt,” she says, “that if he had the ISR skills that he would be the Christian he was before—he would have survived through that.”
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Additional reading: Not One More Child Drowns: Infant Swimming Resource by Marla Carnes, published Aug. 29, 2011.