Family's scare turns into miracle
Family's scare turns into miracle

By Jim Stafford

Published: December 25, 2007

The panicked screams of Dr. Stephen Prescott's sister-in-law shattered the predawn quiet of a family Christmas retreat deep in the mountains of southern Utah in 1991.

Clarke Abbey carried her 4-year-old son, Ben, in her arms as she burst into the bedroom where Prescott, now president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, and his wife, Susan, were sleeping.

The child was suffering from a bad cold or respiratory infection, and his mother had been trying to help him breathe with a steam treatment in a hot shower.

Then he turned blue.

She rushed into the basement bedroom in which her medically trained brother-in-law was sleeping.

"She was holding him in her arms and he was blue,” recalled Prescott, then a professor of medicine and head of the Eccles Program in Human and Molecular Biology and Genetics at the University of Utah.

"He had respiratory arrest and wasn't breathing at all.”

Prescott and the rest of the party charged back up the steps to the kitchen and laid Ben on a counter.

Prescott began trying to breathe for Ben, blowing air into his nose and mouth, but it was obvious that something was obstructing his airway. His chest was not moving.

"I was afraid he had epiglotitis,” Prescott said. "That's the little thing in your throat that covers up the trachea when you swallow so things don't go the wrong way. When that gets infected and swollen, then you can't get air past there, which happens sometimes.”

The only recourse was to perform a tracheotomy by cutting a hole in the child's throat and providing a passage for air to reach his lungs.

In between blowing air into the mouth of Ben and pounding on his chest, Prescott ordered his wife to call some medical associates 250 miles away in Salt Lake City for advice. He sought a knife and a ballpoint pen to perform the tracheotomy.

The knife was needed to slice through the skin, and the hollow tube of the pen would be inserted into the boy's trachea so that air could pass through.

Prescott's father in-law brought him a butcher knife, much too large for the job.

"Finally, I get a paring knife and I go ahead and cut the skin and expose the tissue in order to get to the trachea,” he said. "I'm yelling at my mother-in-law, telling her I need a pen. So she comes up with a fountain pen. I yell, ‘no!' Then she comes up with a Bic. I yell ‘no!'”

The two were still growling at each other over the issue of the pen when a Christmas miracle happened. Ben began breathing on his own.

"Suddenly his chest expands and he sort of coughs and sputters and begins to breathe on his own,” Prescott said.

Turns out it wasn't a severe case of eppiglotitis that clogged the child's air passageway, but mucus plugging the airway from secretions. The mucus dam finally broke loose from all the panicked pounding and breathing for him that his uncle had done.

Ben was alive, but the comedy of errors continued.

The remote vacation cabin was 12 miles from the city of Moab, Utah, off the main road and down a hill on a gravel road. Emergency responders had been called but they couldn't reach the cabin in their vehicle. A policeman raced down the road in his cruiser and slid to a stop in the parking area of the compound.

When the family rushed out to take Ben to the hospital, the two-wheel-drive police cruiser wouldn't budge in the snow. They were all blocked in.

"We have to push the cop car out of the way,” Prescott said.

The bottom line to the drama was that Ben survived and today is a student at Northern Arizona University. He had no ill effects other than the scar that he proudly carries with him today.

"He shows people (the scar) all the time,” Prescott said. "He will say ‘that's where my uncle tried to cut my throat.'”

The extended Prescott family returned to the same remote mountain cabin for another Christmas gathering this year, with the same cast of characters.

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