By Cathy Ingalls
For the Gazette-Times | Posted: Friday, December 5, 2008 12:00 am
LEBANON - Karie Truelove was in her kitchen early Monday evening when she heard neighbor Stefanie Stanley at her front door screaming, "Help my baby. Help my baby."
Seconds before, Stanley, 24, had found her young son face down in the bathtub, not breathing and "purple as a grape."
Truelove rushed past her boyfriend, Josh McIntosh, who had opened the door, to get to Stanley.
"She was a mother in fear," said Truelove, who has taken CPR classes, with an emphasis on saving children. "I thought her son was choking so I swiped the inside of his mouth with my hand. There was nothing there, so I put him on the floor to begin CPR and thought, 'OK, I'm going to do this.' "
After what seemed like forever but was probably only two minutes, she said, 5-month-old Brayden Breshears opened his left eye.
"That was the first sign of life," said Truelove, who is a subsitute teacher. "Then he made gurgling sounds so I put him on his right side, cleared his air passage, and water spewed out. It was a pretty exciting moment."
While Truelove was performing CPR, McIntosh called for an ambulance. The paramedics told Truelove when they arrived that if no one had started CPR before they got there, "he would have been gone and they couldn't have resuscitated him," she said.
Brayden was taken immediately to Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital for a 24-hour observation, his mother said in an interview Wednesday. Her son is fine now, she said.
"I'm still shook up, and I'm thanking God, and I now believe in guardian angels," she said. "Karie is now my son's guardian angel. I was very, very lucky Karie was home. To show our thanks, we bought her a guardian angel necklace."
Stanley said it was about 5 p.m. Monday when she was giving Brayden a bath. He was sitting in the tub in his bath chair with suction cups. Stanley said she left the room briefly to get a towel, and when she returned, her son was face down in the water.
"I just panicked," she said. "Karie was the first person I thought of, so I ran to her for help."
At the time, Stanley was at home with the baby and her 5-year-old son, who was sleeping. Her fiancé, Michael Breshears, was in class at Chemeketa Community College in Salem.