Fire Ant Trauma is the first story from the twenty-fifth episode of Season 3, a 30-minute episode which aired on May 5, 1992 on CBS. It airs in syndication on Episode 123S: Fire Ant Trauma; Spiderman Rescue.
Story[]
On April 7, 1991, the Mosely family was enjoying a quiet, relaxing Sunday at their home outside Macon, Georgia. Ken watched television with a friend while Leslie washed the car outside and kept an eye on their two children, three-year-old Daniel and sixteen-month-old Toni. Daniel sat in a swing while Toni walked around the yard, sipping juice, and then she tripped.
Leslie heard Toni let out a whimper, looked up, and saw her face down on a large fire ant hill. Leslie ran to her, swept her up, and brushed off the ants from her arms and legs. "They're so vicious that as soon as you disturb the nest, they're out there, and they were everywhere and they were just swarming," she said. She noticed a lot of ant bites on her but wasn't too concerned because she had been previously bitten over fifty times.
Leslie set Toni in a swing and asked Ken to come outside and watch her while she finished washing the car. He came right out and saw that her eyes and lips were swollen, and her face was covered in white blotches. Thinking it must be a reaction to the bites, Leslie went inside to get her an antihistamine. Within another minute, she began to gasp for air. Ken grabbed her from the swing and ran to the house. By the time he got inside, she started to have seizures.
Leslie told Ken to jump in the car with Toni and drive toward the hospital, called 911, told dispatcher C.C. Hendricks Ken's route, and asked him to have an ambulance intercept the car. Leslie knew that to wait for an ambulance to arrive at the house, which was located in such a remote area, might be fatal. "The toughest part," she recalls, "was to let Ken go with her and not knowing if she'd be alive when I got to her."
Paramedic Keith Soles and his partner, Jim Walsh, were dispatched by Macon Bibb Fire Dispatcher Cici Hendricks at 11:45am to intercept Ken's car. From the description of the intercepting vehicle, the headlights and emergency flashers would be on. They turned on the lights and siren and immediately responded to do so. They had no idea where they might encounter it but were aware that there was a potential for people to die from severe allergic reactions. They knew somebody could be in a dangerous situation when there's an interception on the way to the hospital and that somebody could get into an accident. They hoped to intercept Toni before her airway swelled to the point where it closed, and she couldn't breathe anymore.
Ken tried to maintain his calm as he sped to the hospital with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on Toni, whom he hoped would stay conscious. As he turned off the two-lane road onto the divided interstate, her condition continued to deteriorate.
Meanwhile, Leslie headed to the hospital with Ken's friend. "All I could think of on the way to the hospital," she recalls, "was, 'God, please don't take my baby.' You can never replace a child."
Ken heard a siren and pulled onto the shoulder. He jumped out of the car and hoped the paramedics, who were approaching from the opposite direction, would see him waving. Soles and Walsh did see him on the other side of the highway holding Toni, but rather than drive across the median, they exited the next off-ramp and reentered on his side. They whisked Toni from his arms, loaded her into the ambulance, and rushed to the hospital. "The child was trying to cry," Soles remembers, "but was in a respiratory state where they couldn't and had to concentrate their total effect on breathing."
At Coliseum Hospital, Toni was examined and treated by Dr. Tim Graves. "Her condition was at the breakpoint," he recalls. "She was either going to get better or get worse fairly quickly." She was given oxygen to aid her breathing and an injection of epinephrine to reverse the effects of allergic reaction. Her condition immediately improved, and she started to scream and cry, a positive sign that she was responding to the injection.
"Toni is back to normal," said Ken, "and she can do everything normal kids do, as well as wrap Daddy around her little finger. I'm very grateful to the emergency room people and the paramedics." Dr. Graves feels that the Moseleys' decision to meet the ambulance on the road―unwise and not advisable in general―proved to be a smart move in Toni's case because allergic reactions can cause devastating results in minutes. If she gets stung by a bee or a wasp in the future, or bitten by ants again, she may suffer an even more deadly allergic reaction the next time. For this reason, the Moseleys now carry a medical kit with epinephrine―the same drug used at the hospital―at all times. "Toni will grow up okay. She's playful and spunky, smart and wild, and she gives her brother a hard time," Leslie recalls.
In other media[]
"Fire Ant Trauma" is one of the 81 stories featured in the book Rescue 911: Extraordinary Stories by Linda Maron.
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