A Talkative Toddler Saves The Day!

Australia, Children, Health & Body, Home, Inspirational, Neighbors | Friendly | December 9, 2020

CONTENT WARNING: This story contains content of a medical nature. It is not intended as medical advice.

I live with my husband and six-year-old daughter in a house on a pretty quiet street in a small town. On one side of our house is a house that gets rented out as a short-term rental; sometimes it’s an AirBNB and sometimes there’s someone there for up to six months. We’ve just had a couple and their two young children move in. The dad is a doctor and was born in Australia before working overseas for years, and he has only just managed to get his wife and kids over from their home country.

The kids speak both English and Farsi. The dad knocks on our door to introduce himself and let us know they will be there until they buy a house of their own, and to let us know that his wife doesn’t speak a lot of English, so please don’t think her rude. We don’t; she often tries her best to greet us and make small talk, and we don’t mind helping her practice. Her older child is a five year-old-boy who sometimes comes over and knocks to see if my daughter can come out and play. The younger kid is a tiny little toddler girl with a gorgeous smile, but she can’t speak much yet.

One day, the older kids are in school and I hear a tiny knock on our door. I open it to find my neighbor’s toddler crying on my front step.

Me: “[Toddler]?! Honey, what’s wrong?”

The toddler continues to cry and babbles in a combination of Farsi and English. The only word I can make out is “Mama.” She is absolutely beside herself.

I scoop her up and give her a cuddle, trying to calm her down. I yell my neighbor’s name over the fence, thinking maybe the toddler ran off while in the yard with her mother and she might be frantically searching. No response.

Toddler: *Still crying* “Mama fall. Mama bang, bang bang! Fall down.”

My heart about stops. I scramble over the fence and find their door open. I call out to my neighbor again. No response. I carry the toddler into the house, and I realise I can smell burning. I get to the kitchen and find my neighbor on the floor, bleeding from her head, not breathing, with a toasted sandwich burning on the hot plate. I turn it off and call an ambulance, putting the toddler down so I can start CPR.

I did CPR until the ambulance got there and took over. Realising the toddler had nowhere to go, I opted to come to the hospital with them and figure out how to contact her husband from there, as I had no idea where he worked. I’d assumed he was at one of the medical practices in town. Imagine everyone’s stunned surprise when we climbed out of the ambulance and the toddler started yelling, “DADA!” and tried to scramble into her dad’s arms as he stood at the doors of the ER.

It turned out the mother had been electrocuted by the electric kettle and had fallen down, hitting her head on the way. Her toddler had somehow gotten out of her highchair, unlocked the front door, gone out their gate, found my gate, somehow opened it despite it being out of her reach, and climbed up the ten steps to my front door and knocked on my door. We still don’t know how long her mother had been unconscious and not breathing on the floor before I found her. She managed to make a full recovery after a hard slog in hospital and at rehab, all thanks to a very determined little girl who knew her mother needed help!

This story is part of our Most Inspirational Of 2020 roundup!