Emma Wright’s two-year-old daughter fell headfirst onto concrete, shattering her skull but lived to tell the tale.
Emma Wright held her daughter Keiana’s tiny hand and gazed upon her bruised face, which was so swollen that she was barely recognisable. Tubes and wires tangled around the little girl’s head and doctors had told Emma that below Keiana’s beautiful blonde hair, her skull was shattered.
After falling five metres onto concrete, the toddler’s chances of pulling through were slim to none. It was a miracle the two-year-old had even survived the horrific fall and now came an even bigger battle to heal from her terrible head injuries.
Sitting by the hospital bed, Keiana’s dad David (34) closed his eyes and fought back memories of the fall earlier that evening. Emma was still at work and David was putting their three children Keiana, Lateisha (1) and Jesse (4) to bed on the second floor of their townhouse.
As he tucked them in, he realised the bedroom was very warm and opened the window very slightly for some air. Sitting at his computer downstairs to finish some administration work, he saw something fall past the window.
“I thought it was a doll the children had been throwing toys around,” he says. But as the object thudded onto the concrete outside, something told him it wasn’t a toy and he ran outside while the nanny called the ambulance.
“I saw Keiana lying on the ground face-up, still conscious,” he says. “I had to hide my horror and keep talking to keep her awake. I put her into the recovery position and waited for the ambulance to arrive.”
David then had the difficult task of calling Emma and breaking the horrific news. The New Zealand family had been living in Britain for three months when the accident happened.
Emma (33) vividly remembers the phone call that turned her day upside down. “I was busy chatting away, so I didn’t really take it in when David said, ‘Emma, you need to brace yourself.’ Then he said, ‘Keiana has fallen out of a window,’ and that’s when I became hysterical. I just couldn’t believe something so awful had happened.”
The family had recently moved from Wellington to the UK town of oxford and had been happily exploring their new home. But now close family and friends who had been eagerly waiting to hear about the move were waiting for news of a different type as David and Emma stayed at Keiana’s bedside.
Intensive care doctors put the toddler into a coma in the hope it would allow her serious head injuries to heal. “She was so disfigured, she didn’t look like herself,” says Emma. “I kept thinking, ‘Are we ever going to get our Keiana back?'”
Then the anxious parents were told Keiana might need holes drilled into her head to relieve the pressure. “Nobody could tell us what the long-term damage would be,” Emma says. “We didn’t know if she would be blind, in a wheelchair, or brain-damaged. But we didn’t care how she ended up. We just wanted her back.”
For the week Keiana was in the coma, her Christian parents set up a bedside vigil, praying she would survive. “David and I were emotionally wrung out,” Emma says. “But it was amazing how our friends supported us.”
“It was a roller coaster of a week,” David agrees. “But when Keiana gradually woke up after her drugs were reduced, we were told not to expect much.”
“She was groggy for three days,” Emma says. “And she didn’t make a sound because she was so traumatised.”
Amazingly, the little girl made swift progress. First Keiana was able to sit up with help, then shortly after that she started responding to noise and moving her eyes. “We could eventually take her for short car rides and she began to smile again,” says Emma. “That’s when I knew she was back.”
“over the next few weeks her vision improved,” David explains. “She started eating, and seeing the other children play spurred her on to stand unaided.”
“The specialist couldn’t believe it when he came into her room and saw a smiling girl sitting up and eating food all by herself,” Emma says, laughing. “He asked to see Keiana and when I pointed to her, he had to reread her medical notes. He started calling her ‘miracle girl’.”
Keiana spent three weeks in hospital after a phenomenally speedy recovery. However, there was still some concern that she may have damaged her eyes permanently.
“We had to wait three months for her brain to settle down before we could assess the damage,” David says. “We were really worried because she sometimes tripped over nothing. So when we were told her eyesight was fine, we were ecstatic. We couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.”
Almost a year after her fall, Keiana is a healthy, happy three-year-old who loves bouncing on the bed with her brother and sister. Her frightening accident is behind her but Keiana still remembers her ordeal.
“occasionally Keiana will say, ‘I fell out of a window’,” Emma says. “But her version of events has changed, as if she knows she was lucky to survive. Now she says, ‘I fell out of a window and Daddy caught me.'”
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