A new mom has described the moment she woke up to find her newborn daughter "blue and cold" and what she did next. Layna Wells, of Missouri, said there was nothing out of the ordinary about that particular morning. She woke up at 5 a.m. to feed her 3-week-old daughter, Stevie, burped her, and held her for about 15 to 20 minutes before laying her back down to sleep.
Wells said it was around 7 a.m. when she next woke to every new parent's worst nightmare. "I don't know why I woke up, but I did," she told Newsweek. "I rolled over to see my daughter blue and cold." Unswaddling Stevie's limp, blue body, Wells immediately sprang into action.
"I immediately turned her over, did the five blows between the shoulders, turned her over again and did the compressions," she said. That was when she noticed Stevie had started to breathe again. "I started to aggressively massage her skin to make sure the blood was flowing properly, and that's when her eyes opened," Wells said.
"She didn't cry." Wells said Stevie was awake all the way to the ER but "never cried" during the journey. "When they started checking her vitals and took her temperature, that's when she started to cry for the first time since CPR, and that was well over an hour later," Wells said. She was diagnosed with a Brief Resolved Unexplained Event (BRUE).
A BRUE is a brief, unexplained episode in an infant that has resolved by the time medical care is sought. While the event can be frightening for parents, modern pediatric guidance views BRUE as distinct from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID), and most infants who experience a low-risk BRUE have excellent outcomes and are not at increased risk of sudden infant death. Historically, a predecessor term called ALTE (Apparent Life-Threatening Event) was studied partly because doctors wondered whether it might be linked to SIDS.
However, research over time found that most of these events were not precursors to SIDS, which led the American Academy of Pediatrics to replace ALTE with the more specific term BRUE in 2016. "There was no reason for why it happened," Wells said. "Nothing clogged her airways.
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