Kent Air Ambulance

A family who live in Canada Close in Folkestone have special reason to be grateful to Kent Air Ambulance. Each year they put on a special display of Christmas lights and it is different each year. There is a bucket on the wall (protected by security etc) for people to put donations in. When we went to see it last night, they had a sign up that said they had raised £450 for the Kent Air Ambulance so far. I put a donation in because we too have reason to be grateful to an air Ambulance service.

When my children had their accident in 1989, Caelyn's head injury was severe. Her skull was shattered like and eggshell and she was descalped and there was a lot of bleeding. It was difficult to control - what do you do? You could hardly put a tourniquet around her neck and because her brain was exposed you could not apply direct pressure to control bleeding. All they could do was put loads of packing on it and hope it would clot. The specialist hospital was in Pretoria and by road, they would have had to use dirt roads part of the time then potholed roads for about 45 min until getting on to the Motorway at Delmas. With dirt roads and potholes the clotting would have been disturbed and she probably would have bled to death if transported by road. The helicopter turned up with a doctor and a nurse, both trauma care specialists.

The child who was so near death is now the mother of a beautiful little girl herself. We will always support Air Ambulance Charities in gratitude for a happy ending that would not have occurred without them.