2-year-old fully recovered from near-drowning
Polk County Enterprise - October 2009

BY VALERIE REDDELL
Editor
polknews@gmail.com

LIVINGSTON — It’s back to business as usual for 2-yearold Cody Heath. He was riding his bicycle and playing with toy dump trucks Tuesday and that’s a tremendous relief for family members who found Cody on the bottom of a swimming pool seven days earlier. Cody’s mother Christina Rood- Heath said doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital discharged her son at 6 a.m. Sunday. “We left there with no prescriptions,” she said. “They said he will be fine. He knows who everybody is and hasn’t missed a lick since we got home.” Heath said Cody was a little weak and wobbly from the six-day hospital stay but he has been back to his regular routine for the last two or three days. At 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 22. Cody had arrived at John and Kelly Rood’s home on Hummingbird as his cousins were preparing to leave for school. (John Rood and Christina Heath are brother and sister and his grandmother cares for him at the Rood home while his parents are at work.) Cody loves to ride to school with his cousins, so when he didn’t come out to the car with the other children, the family began an immediate search.

Alyssa Rood headed straight for the pool in the back yard and saw Cody on the bottom and told her mother, Kelly Rood, who jumped into the pool and retrieved Cody. Kelly’s brother, Ross Wheeland, started CPR and revived the child. Wheeland is an emergency medical technician in New Caney. Cody was first taken to Memorial Medical Center-Livingston where his condition was stabilized. Medical helicopters were grounded that day due to weather so Texas Children’s Hospital sent a ground ambulance from its Kangaroo Crew mobile intensive care unit to transport Cody back to the Houston hospital. “He’s a miracle baby,” Christina Rood-Heath said. “Everywhere we go, people are amazed.”