With the help of science, toddler’s brain damage reversed from near-drowning

A two-year-old girl suffered brain damage after she nearly drowned last year. She was in the water in the family pool at their home for 10 minutes.

USA Today identified the girl as Eden Carlson. The incident took place in February 2016 after she managed to get out of the baby gate installed at their home. Her mother thought all along that she was safe inside and was playing with her older siblings.

The mother was in the shower when the girl went to the swimming pool. After finding Carlson, her mother administered CPR on her daughter before she was ultimately revived at a hospital. She also suffered a cardiac arrest.

Carlson was not expected to survive

She had no heartbeat anymore when they found her and doctors no longer expected that she would survive. She did survive, but Carlson had severe brain damage making her unable to speak or walk or do the normal things a two-year-old can do.

The doctors who worked on her case said that she would never eat, walk, or talk anymore due to the severity of the damage in her brain.

The parents of Carlson believed there was more for their child so they asked for a second opinion and was told that there is another way.

Oxygen therapy helped in reversing brain damage

Carlson was taken to Paul Harch of Hyperbaric Medicine at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine. They just started a therapy in their hospital called Hyperbaric Oxygen, and this helped in reversing the brain damage. Initially, she was given oxygen at sea-level pressure. It was administered to Carlson through her nose, and it lasted for 45 minutes, two times daily. A month after this, they started the hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy on her.

The therapy has not been approved by the FDA in the past, but the hospital was experimenting with it.

Months later, Carlson started laughing again, and she was able to move her arms, hands, and eyes. She was also talking and climbed her play set on her own.

Harch noted that the regrowth of the tissue due to the therapy was possible because they were working on a young child. If the patient had been older, the tissue would not have grown back at a fast rate, New York Daily News reported.

Carlson still has a mild residual brain injury but the two major parts that had a brain injury, the cortical and white matter atrophy, are nearly completely reversed. The doctors who worked on Carlson’s case cannot promise that the therapies will also work on other people, but it could be an option.