The desperate parents of an eight-year-old boy had to perform life-saving CPR on their son twice – after his heart stopped due to a freak cloud of DUST.
Aidan Bungay nearly died just five days before Christmas when the killer cloud of red dust swept up from the Sahara Desert struck Britain – and caused him to stop breathing and collapse.
He had been playing football and watching television when he complained to mum Lynne, that he needed an inhaler.
But within minutes, the youngster’s lips had turned blue – and as her husband Andrew, performed CPR she realised her son had stopped breathing.
Lynne, from Southborough, Kent, said: “He was doing football tricks while I was running a bath and he came in and said, ‘Mummy, I can’t breathe’.
“He said ‘I need a nebuliser,’ and I took him downstairs.
“By the time I’d got the nebuliser he had a funny look in his eyes.
“Suddenly it looked as if a stripe of blue paint was across his lips.”
His frantic parents called an ambulance and within seconds Aidan had collapsed on the floor.
The 40-year-old added: “We gave him CPR and my daughter Ashleigh was on the sofa screaming.
“We all were screaming. He’d stopped breathing.”
Aidan briefly came back to life and vomited, but seconds later he collapsed again before paramedics could arrive.
Lynne said: “They worked on him for 20 minutes in the playroom and couldn’t get any tubes into him, so they set up a mini-operating theatre.
“For 40 minutes they had to drill into his shoulder, into the bone marrow, to get oxygen into his brain.”
Aidan was put in an induced coma and taken by road to Tunbridge Wells Hospital, before being transferred to the intensive care unit at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.
He was released the night before Christmas Eve.
Relieved Lynne added: “We had the best Christmas and New Year – being a parent if you’re in the kitchen or washing up, you’re always saying ‘in a minute.’
“I will never say ‘in a minute’ again.”
