The Dunns [dot] C.A.

How’s that for an attention grabber? To elaborate, we had a bit of a scare on a trip to Halifax over the past few days, but everything is just fine now and we are back in our regular routine.

I had the opportunity to work out of the Halifax office on Thursday and Friday, which was a welcome break from being alone in the office here. Anyway, after work on Friday, I headed to my colleague’s house nearby for a beer on the patio. Tamara and Marshall came by shortly after and we were all enjoying the weather and a chance to relax. Marshall was playing with some of their boy’s toys on the deck when he suddenly tipped over without warning and became unresponsive. At first, we thought he was fooling around, but it quickly became apparent that we had a potential medical emergency on our hands.

Obviously this would give anyone a jolt, but we were able to focus on getting some help. One of the neighbours just happened to be an emergency room physician at the regional children’s hosptial (IWK), and she was on the scene within minutes. I was on the phone with 911 and paramedics were dispatched. They also arrived very quickly, and Marshall was starting to come out of his trance as the deck filled up with strangers wanting to help.

Without going into a lot of details, he was checked out at the IWK and released within an hour or so. More than one doctor explained that this kind of activity in children under 5 is more common than one might expect, although not really undertsood. While this is not 100% comforting, is did reassure us in knowing that there was not something more serious going on. They had been particularly concerned about the possibility of a fever, which was never present – that would have made matters much worse.

So Marshall will be referred for a routine EEG (brainwave test) just to make sure there isn’t something obvious that should be treated – but nobody is expecting it to result in anything unusual.

We want to thank everyone that gave us tremendous support as this event unfolded. Please do not worry about our little guy – he is completely fine and back to his chipper self.