Her name was Elettra and she was a beautiful 18-month-old girl, blonde and with blue eyes. She died due to a tragic accident, the one most feared by adults who see children playing at home who grab objects and at that age always tend to put them in their mouths to find out their nature.
Elettra died of suffocation after swallowing a plastic cap in her family’s home on the Lido of Venice. The drama occurred between Friday evening and Saturday morning and now the little girl’s mother is complaining about the long waiting times and the lack of emergency services on the lagoon island.
The episode occurred while the little girl was playing with household objects but under the careful supervision of her father and mother Ivan Friselle and Emili Massarotto, a well-known and respected couple in San Nicolò where she lives. A few seconds, however, were enough for her little one to raise a plastic cap to her lips and throw it down in an instant.
The parents intervened immediately, practicing the first maneuvers to try to get the plug expelled from the little girl’s throat. Nothing to do. The little girl was experiencing increasing difficulty breathing and at this point her father called 118 to have a doctor from the nearby Lido emergency room arrive as soon as possible. Then, the parents themselves decided to get in the car and rush to the hospital to shorten the rescue time.
Once we reached our destination, the doctor on duty performed life-saving maneuvers but the little girl suffered cardiac arrest. Once the emergency procedure had started, there was a call for an air ambulance.
The mother’s story: «We arrived at the emergency room at 7.10 on Friday and the 118 helicopter arrived at 7.30 from Treviso with paramedics. They had to stabilize her. They left at 11am with a second helicopter sent from Padua because the first one, which broke down, was unable to take off and so precious time was lost, a lot of time, too much time.”
In Padua “they attached my daughter to an ECMO machine” but “she remained too long without oxygen. They removed the cap that she had swallowed with pliers after we were there for hours. Our question is why they didn’t take it away from the Lido straight away, and you waited so long? They replied to me that there is no device at the Lido to see where the obstruction was.”
The death occurred at 8.45am on Saturday. «The Lido paramedics were good – her mother always reported – because for an hour and a half they performed maneuvers on her without giving up. If there had been machinery to see where the obstruction was perhaps they could have cut and saved it. It is unacceptable that there is only one first aid point at the Lido.”
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