Nurse who helps save infant at El Toro shares experience

There were terrifying moments Monday night for new parents Michael and Nicole Turull when their infant, Isla, stopped breathing while they were eating at a Mexican restaurant.

“I heard someone yell, ‘does anyone know CPR?’ ” nurse manager and pediatric nurse Christine Branford said.

The registered nurse said she didn’t plan going to El Toro in Bellbrook that night. The Turulls also said they hadn’t planned eating there. The couple called it divine intervention that brought their family and two nurses to the same place, or there may have been a different outcome.

RELATED: Nurses at Bellbrook El Toro restaurant rush to help infant

“I’m at El Toro in Bellbrook and my 6-week-old is not breathing and she’s starting to get blue,” Nicole Turull said in a frantic 911 call.

Branford and a nurse unknown to her rushed over and put Isla flat on the table.

“Mary was her breaths and I was her heartbeat,” Branford said of the other nurse. “I could hear Nicole saying ‘please save my baby, please save my baby.’

“It was very emotional ... I knew that it was up to me and up to Mary,” said Branford, who works at Atrium Medical Center in Middletown.

After four or five cycles of rescue breathing, Isla started breathing on her own.

The Turulls said they will forever remember how the nurses saved their baby’s life, and the horror of almost losing her.

“She was gone, I mean, if I’m being honest, she was gone,” Nicole Turull said.

Their daughter Isla was born eight weeks permature, and had feeding issues. Her mother had only been breastfeeding her for a couple minutes at El Toro before Isla began turning blue.

“She handed her to me and that was the darkest moment in my life is looking at her and remembering what she looked like in that moment, where her color was different, she wasn’t repsonding,” Michael Turull said. “Her eyes were rolled back and you knew it was bad.”

Isla is at the Dayton Children’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, where staff are working to find the source of Isla’s medical issues; however, doctors told the Hurulls it was nothing they nor any other person caused. In the meantime, Isla will remain at the NICU, where her parents love hearing her cries.

“Now it’s a reassuring sound. It’s a safe sound, it’s like, OK, she’s breathing,” Nicole Turull said.

Isla also has a lifelong supporter.

“I better be invited to her birthday, to her wedding,” Branford said.

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