Forty-Eight Hours
A pulse of twenty-two beats a minute in a six-year-old is a child in profound respiratory and cardiac depression and it is about nine minutes from being nothing at all.
I did not scream.
I have been asked about that more times than about anything else and the answer is not courage, it is that I have spent nineteen years in rooms where the correct response to catastrophe is a sequence of actions in an order, and my body went and got that sequence before anybody consulted me.
I got my phone out and I called 911 and I put it on speaker on the edge of the casket and I started rescue breathing.
And what I said, when the dispatcher answered, was this, and it is on a recording that has been played in two proceedings: