A three year-old’s plunge from the eighth floor of an apartment in Hunan Province that has resulted in no major injuries has been called nothing short of a “miracle” by medical workers.
Xiangxiang (a pseudonym) was finally released from the No.1 People’s Hospital in Changde on Monday after tumbling out of his family’s home on October 1. He was being held for observation since his October 1 fall. Doctors say say Xiangxiang avoided any serious injuries, only suffering soft tissue contusions.
Residents of a Dingcheng District neighborhood said they heard a crashing sound at around 8am before discovering that a child had fallen from an apartment above.
The fall didn’t appear to upset Xiangxiang that much. A property management worker told a reporter, “The child was just quietly sitting on the grass, neither crying nor making a fuss, just making a ‘huh’ sound.” Furthermore, the property management worker explained how Xiangxiang was able to miraculously survive such a fall:
A quilt hung out to dry on the seventh floor and the grass below worked to soften the impact. The child’s light body mass and his flexibility also played a part in helping his from being harmed. He is really lucky.
Xiangxiang’s family was not at home at the time. The boy was only transported to hospital at 11am, three hours after he fell.
Head nurse Chen at the No.1 People’s Hospital in Changde called Xiangxiang’s recovery “a miracle”, saying “This type of incident is completely unprecedented. Xiangxiang is very lucky to have escaped from such a calamity, he is a lucky child.”
However, children falling from tall apartment buildings and surviving has happened before with regularity in China. In April 2013, a five year-old child fell from his family’s eight-story apartment balcony in Zhuhai, Guangdong without incident, and even took the elevator back up to his apartment by himself. This past February , surveillance video caught a three year-old toddler falling onto a parked car from a three story apartment in Kunming, Yunnan, who was then seen getting up and walking away afterwards. Last April, a three year-old Guangzhou girl astounded hospital staff when she quickly recovered from seriously injuries from falling from a seven-story apartment.
And just last week, a two year-old girl fell from her fifth-story apartment in Guangzhou, Guangdong when her mother was out shopping, and also was diagnosed by doctors to not be suffering from any serious injury (picture seen above).
As Xiangxiang’s parents had done immediately following his fall (seen below), many Chinese parent address the danger of children falling from open windows by installing anti-theft bars over their windows. However, this causes another problem as unattended children playing by a window with such a device installed are prone to having their heads stuck in the anti-theft bars, their bodies slipping through the grate below.
Just today, Xinhua reported a 28 year-old Huizhou, Guangdong woman is responsible for heroically saving a three year-old girl who had fallen through anti-theft bars on her apartment window, hanging only by her head stuck between the device’s bars.
Chinese news has many such stories of heroism, as in the case of a Zhongshan, Guangdong man who managed to catch a falling baby that was spectacularly caught on video, or how a man climbed down the side of a building with a bedsheet in order to save a stuck child. It’s a good thing we have such great people as children in China continue to be left unattended in homes easy access windows that allow these types of incidents to happen over and over again.