Love Works a Miracle--and a Child Lives

Paralyzed from the chest down for the past dozen years, Cindy Dunlop had never been able to muster enough strength to pull herself out of the family swimming pool.

Until Tuesday, that is, when she found her 17-month-old daughter floating face-down in the front-yard pool.

The 29-year-old Dunlop maneuvered her wheelchair into the water. Reaching the little girl, she pushed her up over the pool’s edge and then--clinging to the side--breathed life back into the child.

“I never wanted to lose my child,” Dunlop said Thursday, her voice still soft with emotion two days afterward. “So I didn’t even think about it. I just did it.”

But the hardest part, getting out of the water to call for help, was still to come.

Baby Clutched in Arms

Not knowing if she could do it, Dunlop somehow found the strength to clamber out of the pool. That done, she crawled with the baby across the lawn and into her home. There, she reached a telephone and called paramedics and then her husband. Then she crumpled to the bedroom floor, baby Kyla clutched safely in her arms.

She stayed that way until help arrived.

Recounting what happened in a telephone interview from her remote home in the tiny desert community of Adelanto in San Bernardino County, 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles, the dark-haired, 90-pound Dunlop, who was paralyzed in an automobile accident, said she still was mystified by what she had managed to do.

“I guess it was the adrenaline and knowing I had to do it,” she said, holding her squirming “little ragamuffin” on her lap. “It was determination, just determination and strength.”

Mother and daughter had been playing on a stretch of yard near the pool early Tuesday morning when the telephone rang and Dunlop wheeled herself inside to answer it.

She heard a splash but didn’t panic at first because the family’s springer spaniel Cruiser has this annoying habit of leaping into the pool three or four times a day.

“Then I decided to check anyway and saw her floating,” Dunlop recounted. Cruiser was perched at the edge of the pool, biting at Kyla’s legs, trying to pull her out.

“But he knew he shouldn’t bite hard. I pushed my chair there and I just went right in. I tried getting her out by holding onto the edge of the pool but she was so limp and heavy, I couldn’t. So I just got underneath her and just rolled her up and out.”

With Kyla not breathing, Dunlop hooked her arms over the edge of the pool and turned the child’s face toward her. She pinched the child’s nose shut and began to puff short breaths into her mouth.

The Greatest Sound

“Finally she spit up water and then she gasped and started screaming and crying. It was the greatest thing in the world to hear that scream.”

Although Dunlop had never managed to get out of the pool on her own before, this time, “I knew I had to do it. I knew I had to get help. And so I did.

“I crawled around to my baby, picked her up and held her a little bit. I was crying by now, and then I put her on my chest and crawled on my back to the middle of the lawn.

“I laid her back on the lawn, turned over on my stomach and then crawled, Army style with just my arms, into the bedroom.”

After dialing the emergency 911 telephone number, Dunlop called her husband, Ron, at work in his automotive machine shop in the San Fernando Valley.

“I kept her on the line,” he said, “and called a neighbor to come over and stay with her until the paramedics came. . . . But I knew everything was all right. I could hear Kyla screaming in the background.”

Baby Back at Play

By the time the medics arrived, he said, the blue-eyed little girl was giggling and back at play.

Doctors at St. Mary Desert Valley Hospital in nearby Apple Valley pronounced Kyla in fine form. Her mother, with feet and elbows badly scraped by her crawl across the yard, required medical treatment, however.

Her feet still bandaged Thursday, Dunlop mused about Kyla’s swimming lessons.

“We had the pool and so Kyla had had swimming lessons,” she said. “I guess they didn’t help or maybe the cold of the pool just shocked her.”

As she talked, Ron Dunlop watched Kyla playing outside.

“She’s a happy, energetic kid,” he said, laughing. And then, referring to his wife, he said, “And she’s pretty remarkable.

“She’s in a wheelchair, but she’s sure not handicapped.”