'HER EYES WERE OUT ON STALKS... SHE WAS STARTING TO TURN BLUE'

Mum's quick actions saved baby daughter from choking – now she wants to teach skills to other new parents

- CHARLOTTE O'KEEFE Reporter

NURSE Daniela Harkin-Yarwood is on a mission to get more new parents first-aid trained after experiencing what she has described as “the worst moment of my whole life”.

The 28-year-old has taken up first-aid training after she used the skills she had learned to save her own daughter.

The paediatric nurse at the University Hospital Wales in Cardiff had got back to their home in Penylan, Cardiff, from a walk and baby Thea was sleeping in the pram, when every parent’s worst nightmare unfolded.

“I was coming in from a walk and she was in the pram and had fallen asleep. I left her to sleep in the hallway whilst I was in the study, three feet away from her with the door open,” Daniela explains.

“I heard her cough and she'd had a bug so I thought ‘oh great she's waking up’ but then silence. I carried on working for a few seconds but I just thought, ‘Why hasn’t she woken up?”

Daniela says something made her go and check on her daughter.

“She was laying there wide awake,” she recalls.