Walter Finch
A young police trainee has been hailed a hero after his quick thinking saved the life of a four-year-old girl who had stopped breathing.
Rookie cop Ivan, 25, from Malaga, was on duty at the Local Police station in La Linea, Cadiz, when he heard a pounding on his door, Sur In English report.
When he opened the door, he was confronted by the sight of a desperate father holding the limp body of his young daughter.
“She’s unconscious and not breathing,” the distraught father said of his daughter Maria.
Realising that her life was slipping away and every second counted, Ivan tried to reopen her airways but to no response.
He then laid her on the floor and began desperate attempts at PCR to revive the child.
The actions of pumping her chest and breathing into her mouth went on for three or four agonising minutes, accompanied by an encroaching sense of hopelessness.
But all of a sudden, to the delight of the father and the assembled police officers, Maria opened her eyes and began to cough.
“I could only think about what I was doing, but I was convinced she would come round,” Ivan said afterwards.
She was rushed to a nearby hospital with a fever, where she remained under observation to determine what the cause of her episode was.
The father returned to the police station to embrace Ivan in a giant bear hug for saving his daughter’s life.
Ivan comes from a cop family, with both his father and uncle serving, one in the National Police and the other in the Local Police in Fuengirola.
The modest hero has brushed aside acclaim for his actions, declaring: “All that matters is that she gets well.”
