Ala. Boy Revived After Nearly Drowning `100% Recovered`

Aug. 28--A month ago Saturday, 3-year-old Tex Hanners' wet and seemingly lifeless body lay on the warm concrete at his mother's Decatur home.

Autumn Hanners pressed her hands into her son's chest and blew air into his unconscious body.

With each breath she passed on to her son, a bit of water that had filled the boy's lungs escaped his mouth.

Just moments prior, Hanners' youngest child had politely asked her for a grape as his two brothers, Dakota, 8, and Magnus, 5, played in the shallow end of the pool.

"I turned my back for a minute to get more grapes for the other ones, and when I turned back, Tex was gone," Hanners said.

Seconds later, the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy was spotted at the bottom of the pool, near the deep end. The blow-up floats he wore on his arms just minutes before were gone.

"When we were doing CPR, every time we'd get a breath in him, the grape would come up and block his airway," Hanners said. "He apparently had it in his mouth and jumped in the pool.

"We still haven't figured out how he got his floaties off in just a minute or two."

That horrible day -- the frantic CPR, the interminable ambulance ride to Parkway Medical Center and the drive to Huntsville Hospital, where Tex had been flown by MedFlight that evening -- are now a blur to Autumn Hanners.

But what's clear to her and the family is how lucky Tex is to be alive, having emerged from the event the same smiling, energetic boy that jumped into the pool on the afternoon of July 30.

"I've gone out on so many calls like this, and they just don't turn out with a happy ending," Decatur firefighter Jimmy Prickett said.

Prickett and his fellow Station 5 firefighters Kevin Naler and Lt. Shawn Chandler responded to the call at the two-story house at 2019 Lancaster Ave. S.W.

"When we rounded that corner of the house and saw that little boy lying there, we all saw our children, our sons, lying there," Naler said.

Tex spent 11 days at Huntsville Hospital before he was released Aug. 10. When he arrived, doctors immediately put him into a medically-induced coma and hooked him up to an oscillator to breathe.

That first night, doctors couldn't tell his parents, Autumn and Benji Hanners, if the baby of their family would survive the night.

The stress on his young heart after being deprived of oxygen threatened to kill him. If it didn't, brain swelling and the permanent damage that often accompanies it loomed as a strong possibility.

"We took it hour by hour," Benji Hanners said. "The doctors said there was no way to tell if he would make it, and if he did, what he would be like afterward."

The Hanners already have lived through the pain of losing a child. Lexi, their first baby together, was born at 24 weeks and died 23 days after she was delivered.

Tex was born prematurely, too, at 27 weeks. When he was 9 months old, he began having trouble breathing. And at a year and half, doctors took cartilage from his ear and rib to build a bigger airway in his throat.

"Here I was thinking he's already had to fight so hard to survive as a baby, and then, here he is again, fighting for his life," Autumn Hanners said.

Seeing his son hooked up to machines in the hospital's pediatric intensive care unit, all those bad memories of losing a daughter began to flood back to Benji Hanners.

"I didn't want to go through that again. Seeing him like that was the hardest thing I have been through, next to losing my daughter," he said.

But as the hours, and then days, went by, Tex got better. Doctors would give his parents "best-case scenarios" each day, Benji Hanners said. Tex always met or exceeded them.

On Aug. 4, he coughed and squeezed his mother's hand. The next day, he opened his eyes for the first time.

"Two days later, they moved him to a regular room, and three days later he came home," Autumn Hanners said. "Everyone kept telling us, 'He's a miracle,' and I truly believe that."

His first desire when he got out of the hospital?

A trip to Chuck E. Cheese in Decatur, a request his parents were more than happy to fulfill. And Wednesday, he joined his friends at the first day of pre-school at Danville-Neel Elementary.

"We know he's special. He's a strong kid," Benji Hanners said. "We know this doesn't happen every day. We're just so grateful he's the same boy after all this.

"All those prayers people sent up to him, that's what pulled him through."