Shannon Carter lay frozen on the bathroom floor of her Whitefield home. She couldn’t move her legs to stand. Carter said she panicked and couldn’t feel sensation in her hands or arms. She lay curled in a fetal position while her son stood by, still wrapped in a towel.
She had just taken her son, three-year-old Chase Peaslee, out of the bathtub, when she fell to the floor. Unable to move, Carter told her son to get her cell phone.
As Carter relived the experience in an interview, Chase found his grandmother’s number in the blackberry phone by scrolling through the ‘contacts’ and pushed the accompanying picture.
Modern technology and the child’s fast adaptability to it brought emergency medical assistance where it was needed. The child was also concerned about his mother.
“He kept saying ‘mummy’s sick, she’s in the bathroom,” said Chase’s grandmother, Christy McIntosh.
McIntosh added that the boy’s father, Roland Peaslee, was fishing offshore and would not have been able to reach Carter.
Starting at 2 a.m. on Aug. 7, Carter had been suffering the flu, vomiting and generally feeling very sick throughout the day, she said. At around 11 a.m., she decided to give her son a bath. When she took Chase out of the bathtub, her muscles seized. Doctors later told Carter she had been severely dehydrated.
“I started to get really numb and couldn’t stand up,” she said.
Lying on the floor, she instructed her son on what to do. The boy pressed the phone against her ear and she yelled into the receiver, calling for help. McIntosh heard her daughter and called an ambulance using the Onstar system installed in her vehicle. First responders arrived within eight minutes, followed by an ambulance shortly after.
Carter said she heard the ambulance crew arrive in her yard, but still could not move. The boy ran out, still wet and naked, to answer the door and let emergency medical service personnel in. She was transported to Miles Memorial Hospital in Damariscotta and released later that evening.
“He’s a brave little boy,” his mother said.