Pool Drain Pulls Small Intestine Out Of Young Girl

[roserougesang]

(WCCO) Minneapolis A 6-year-old Edina, Minn. girl has been hospitalized after a horrific accident at a swimming pool.

Abigail Taylor was severely injured Friday when she sat over an open drain hole in a wading pool at the Minneapolis Golf Club.

Now Abigail's father has a warning to other families: Pool and hot tub drain accidents are a hidden danger that many of us don't understand.

Abigail has big brown eyes, a dazzling smile and at just 6 years old she has already competed in local swim meets.

"She loves to swim," said her father Scott Taylor.

Her love of swimming is why her family didn't think twice when she played at a kiddie pool at the family's golf club on Friday night.

Taylor said as Abigail was getting out of the pool, she fell.

"She more or less blacked out, she passed out, fell face-first onto the pool decking," he said. The family thought it was a seizure.

An ambulance rushed her to Children's Hospital in Minneapolis. Several hours later a surgeon said Abigail was lucky to be alive.

"The suction had caused a two-inch tear in her rectum and had basically disemboweled her by pulling out her small intestines, almost all of it," said Taylor.

Her father said a search of the pool filter turned up Abigail's intestine. He said Abigail was seriously wounded because the cover of the drain had been removed.

In most public pools the drain cover is screwed in and cannot be pulled off. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the pressure on some pool drains can be as strong as 300 pounds per square inch.

"It never even crosses anybody's mind that potential at the bottom of that pool is enough force to literally disembowel a child, an adult," said Taylor.

Abigail will have to be fed intravenously for the rest of her life and will have to have a colostomy bag.

"We view it as a miracle that she's still with us," her father said.

She is improving. Wednesday morning she stunned her family by asking a question.

"She said, 'Am I going to be on the news?' She said, 'Why do you ask?' She said, 'Because I want to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else,'" recalled Taylor.

Since 1990, 170 people, mostly children, have been caught in drains and 27 of them have died. Legislation is pending that would require pools and hot tubs to have multiple drains to ease the suction.

Some pools have a safety vacuum cutoff which shuts down if someone is trapped. New drain covers which cost less than $50 can also help.

According to the Associated Press, an official at the golf club expressed sympathy for the family and said he didn't think anything was wrong with the pool, but referred questions to the club's attorney, who declined to comment.

[wishcat]

Oh my goodness! That is so sad and scary. I feel so bad for her, poor girl.

[thedoll]

This happened about three weeks ago, right?

[Tismine]

That's horrible...

Now to be morbid:
If she had died, could you imagine the autopsy? To think she had drowned, only to discover she had no intestine.
And the drain cleaner. Imagine how freaked he would have been.

[HellforgedX]

I call BS. I wanna see some sources. The Onion doesn't count.
J/K, seriously, where did you find this?

[CptSternn]

Rectum? Damn near killed um!

<rim shot>

[maggot]

...Interesting.



Are they suing the pool?

[Drake Dun]

I really, really wish that this little news item had not been posted. I have not stopped thinking about it for five minutes straight since I read it several hours ago, and I can already tell it will be days or weeks yet before I put it more or less out of mind. I will continue to remember it spontaneously for months or years. I know, because I have been through this routine before. My fucking chest is so tight right now, it's hard to breathe.

I want to be understood clearly, here. I am not taking issue with the original poster, and this is not an accusation toward users or admins at gothic.net. It's a public forum, not my forum, and I'm not about to suggesting policing content of this type. I should have expected something like it to show up in a forum called "Spooky News" sooner or later, and I also should have been smart enough not to read it.

That said, I cannot imagine what reason there could possibly be for posting it. There are those of us in the world who are not well equipped to block out certain vivid images, and who are inclined quite against our own will to obsess about this kind of stuff. One post can cause real anguish. I seriously thought about leaving gothic.net because of this one, before I realized that I could probably avoid a repeat of this by just ignoring the Spooky News section (this is the last time I am going to participate in this area of the board).

The problem is the media. It should be plain to anybody that this story has absolutely no news value whatsoever. Kudos to the journalist for his creativity in making a cursory attempt to recast it as a public safety issue, but it really is a laughable cover. If there were any merit in the story at all, it would have been sufficient to write "A girl suffered life-threatening injuries which may leave her permanently disabled when she was caught in the suction of a pool drain" or something. The ugly details add nothing but horror - which are of course the real point of the story for the slime who sell this shit. I cannot countenance the evident relish with which they were recounted.

I especially like how they went out of their way to paint this image of the victim as a vibrant, beautiful young child, just to make the accident that much more horrifying.

Against the background of a culture underpinned by such a disgusting industry, it's hard to find fault with someone for becoming a vector for the trash we're all fed. All I want to say is, please seriously consider making conscious decisions about what ideas and stories you choose to pass on to others. Your choices matter.

I am astounded that the girl survived. I am trying very hard not to think about what the long term effects of the injury might be, but if I scrape the bottom of the barrel hard enough, I can just barely manage to hope that her entire life is not permanently fucked up and that she will make a substantial recovery. I pray that it is so.

I wonder if they would report it if she did.

I'm going to write a complaint letter to the original source once I manage to calm down again. In the meantime, anybody who wants to write a response to this post that will be read should contact me in one of the other areas of the board or by some other means. I am not touching this thread again with a forty-foot pole.

Thanks ahead of time for reading this post with a patient eye.

Drake

[Underwater Ophelia]

Yeah...I don't know if I believe this really happened. This situation is an urban legend, and was even talked about in that book Haunted by Palaniuck (sp?) I just don't think this is true, or even really possible.

[biohazard]

I still do not understand what happened. Did the girl nearly drowned and got sucked in, when her intestines ripped out? The article does not clealy explain what happened.

[roserougesang]

Yipes, I feel bad now about Drake Dun's response (must remember to apologize when he next posts)

I'm not too sure about the accuracy of the news, just found it on the internet and thought it looked interesting.

Despite being on gnet for 16 months now, I officially now feel like such a twit.

[Underwater Ophelia]

Bio--this is what supposedly happened: Stop reading now if you're squeamish. The little girl sat on a pool drain that was not covered. The suction pulled her intestines out of her body through her anus, and then tore off. At least, that's what I got out of it.

But this is fake, I'm 99% sure, so don't worry about it.

[Renatus]

Actualy from what I've heard from my father when I read about this and told him that this is a true story, and it is not the first time that kind of accident has happened.

[CptSternn]

Its real.

There are dozens of links to the story - google it.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288182,00.html

That being said, like I said in other previous threads, I think 'spooky news' should be centred around news that has some hint of sp00kyness or goth appeal, not just horrible news, or news that for some reason someone posted here that has nothing to do with anything on the site.

Many of the things posted here in my opinion have no place here, as they are merely news articles without any occult/supernatural/spooky appeal.

Then again, we no longer have mods to monitor this so everything stays here unlike before.

[Cicero]

Originally Posted by Underwater Ophelia

Yeah...I don't know if I believe this really happened. This situation is an urban legend, and was even talked about in that book Haunted by Palaniuck (sp?) I just don't think this is true, or even really possible.

Chuck Palahniuk actually said somewhere that his story 'Guts' (in the book 'Haunted') is based on truth. And apparently every time he did a reading of the story in public someone in the audience would faint. Somehow I'm not at all surprised.

For some reason I'm now really really hoping Mythbusters does an episode on this...

[Alaizabel Cray]

Originally Posted by Underwater Ophelia

But this is fake, I'm 99% sure, so don't worry about it.

I saw it on the news the day it happened. It does seem like a crazy made-up story, but freak accidents do happen.

[Underwater Ophelia]

Originally Posted by Cicero

Chuck Palahniuk actually said somewhere that his story 'Guts' (in the book 'Haunted') is based on truth. And apparently every time he did a reading of the story in public someone in the audience would faint. Somehow I'm not at all surprised.

For some reason I'm now really really hoping Mythbusters does an episode on this...

Yeah. I just really feel it's exaggerated and based on urban legend. On the news or not, I can't really believe it.

[the-broken-harlequin]

This reminds me of ghost ship when that wire is cut and everybody is cut in half and trying to push their organs back in.

[biohazard]

Originally Posted by Underwater Ophelia

Bio--this is what supposedly happened: Stop reading now if you're squeamish. The little girl sat on a pool drain that was not covered. The suction pulled her intestines out of her body through her anus, and then tore off. At least, that's what I got out of it.

But this is fake, I'm 99% sure, so don't worry about it.

Thank you for the explaination, Ophelia ^^. The article did not explain well what happened. I understood that her belly was opened, and her intestines ripped apart from it. Don`t worry, I don`t have a soft stomach. Not many things can gross me out.
As for your you being nice, I take it you are no longer mad at me. I am grateful to hear that, Ophelia. i need to keep my opinions about the color I hate to myself, so I do not offend other users. Sorry If I offended you.

[Underwater Ophelia]

Originally Posted by biohazard

As for your you being nice, I take it you are no longer mad at me. I am grateful to hear that, Ophelia.

What...? I was never mad at you. Maybe I thought something you said was a dumbass thing, and it'll happen again, but don't worry about it.

And even if I'm mad at someone, I'll still be nice, usually.

[the-broken-harlequin]

Originally Posted by Underwater Ophelia

What...? I was never mad at you. Maybe I thought something you said was a dumbass thing, and it'll happen again, but don't worry about it.

And even if I'm mad at someone, I'll still be nice, usually.

I beg to differ.

[PinstripesAndPithHelmets]

How did the drain manage to suck out only her small intestine? If the disemboweling resulted from a tear in the rectum, wouldn't it have pulled out the large intestine first? The intestines, though convoluted, are linear things, and the large intestine is the one directly attached to the rectum, making it first in line from that direction.

[Renatus]

Yeah but I'm betting it did it's just the small intestine is more notable because without it there is no possibility of absorbing nutrients naturaly(for those of you who don't know which I hope there are none).

[Raptor]

In which case the reporter could have said she lost all of her intestines, which sounds even more shocking to me. And that seems to be what they were going for.
If this is real, its horrible, but I don't think I believe it. Or maybe I just don't want to. I'm going to see if I can find anything about the pressure figure.

[Raptor]

CptStern was definately right, there are a lot of sources for this. I think it is true and yeh I don't know if its the right sort of story to be posted here.

http://www.cpsc.gov/CPSCPUB/PUBS/363.pdf

On the fifth page:

"From January 1990 through August 2004, CPSC has reports of two incidents of evisceration/disembowelment."