Erin Molan: “It’s just really scary as a mum!”
The presenter recalls the moment she woke to find daughter Eliza struggling to breathe.
By Maddison Leach
Erin Molan was confronted with a situation no parent ever wants to live through when she woke up at 4am on Thursday to discover her daughter Eliza was struggling to breathe.
The radio host shared her harrowing ordeal on The Hughesy, Ed & Erin show after confirming her three-year-old daughter is “fine now”.
But the early morning emergency left Erin shaken, her voice trembling as she recalled some of the details from Eliza’s scare.
“We went to bed and she was fine, and then a few times in the night [she] woke up saying that her throat was sore but then went to sleep pretty quickly,” Erin explained over the phone on the show.
“At 4am this morning she woke up and just couldn’t breathe, which was awful. It’s never happened before, she doesn’t have asthma or anything but she couldn’t get any air in.”
After going to bed with a sore cough, little Eliza woke up in the early hours of the morning struggling to breathe.
Terrified for her daughter’s safety, Erin picked up the phone to call triple zero but hesitated, worrying that she’d be putting a greater burden on already overworked first responders.
Confessing she “second guessed” herself for just a moment, Erin’s parenting instincts quickly kicked in and she called for help and an ambulance.
“They [the emergency staff] were incredible, there was a lady on the phone who talked me through how to get [Eliza] to calm down a bit,” Erin recalled.
“It’s just really scary as a mum to not know how to help her, and she’s panicking because she can’t get enough air in.”
Erin was even more afraid because she was home alone with Eliza, who she shares with former fiancé Sean Ogilvy, and worried that she wouldn’t be able to handle the situation on her own.
But emergency workers stayed on the phone with her until the ambulance arrived and paramedics took over, giving Eliza a steroid shot before taking her and Erin to hospital.
“She’s fine now, but the doctor said the steroid will keep her up for the next few hours so good luck,” she added of her daughter.
Dave ‘Hughesy’ Hughes confessed it sounded like an incredibly “scary” situation for any parent and asked if medical staff had been able to figure out what caused the situation.
Erin confirmed it was croup, a viral infection that causes swelling of the voice box and windpipe, though Eliza has “never had” the illness before.
She added that doctors told her temperatures tend to drop to their lowest between 3am and 4am in the morning, and the cold air can make it even more difficult for those with the infection to breathe.
This article appears on Now to Love and is reproduced here with permission.
