Miracle: A Toddler's Brain Damage has been Reversed over a Year After Near Drowning

By Ariel Scotti

New York Daily News

She's a survivor.

Eden Carlson's near-fatal fall into her family pool left her brain damaged in February 2016 — but doctors have now significantly reversed the trauma in the tenacious toddler.

Physicians used a series of oxygen treatments, like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, to significantly reverse the 2-year-old's brain damage after she was in the water for 15 minutes.

To "wake up" her brain, doctors gave Carlson oxygen at a pressure higher than the general atmospheric pressure — increasing the amount of oxygen in her blood and repairing her damaged tissue in a sealed, pressurized hyperbaric chamber.

"The startling regrowth of tissue in this case occurred because we were able to intervene early in a growing child, before long-term tissue degeneration," hyperbaric specialist Paul Harch from LSU Health New Orleans said in the case report published by Medical Gas Research.

On the day of the near-drowning, the child's mother found her, pulled her out and performed CPR until doctors at her local hospital in Fayetteville, Ark., were ultimately able to revive her two hours later after she also suffered cardiac arrest. Her lack of oxygen resulted in a severe brain injury, leaving the child unable to speak, walk or respond to verbal cues.

View Part I of Eden's Miracle

She was at the hospital for 48 days receiving critical care before being discharged, but Harch wanted to try a course of oxygen therapies to try and help heal Carlson's brain.

First, she was administered oxygen treatments at "normobaric level" (sea level), 55 days after the accident, for 45 minutes at a time, two times per day which helped her regain movement of her arms and hands, her partial ability to eat and speak in short spurts.

Three weeks later, she was moved to New Orleans — at a hospital in possession of the closest hyperbaric chamber — where the hyperbaric oxygen therapy began.

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