Pool Drains = Evil

Although I have the Star Tribune website bookmarked, I rarely look at the newspaper from my hometown. Today I decided to click on it, and I became very sad.

Abigail Taylor died.


Sad.

Last summer at the Minneapolis Golf Club in St. Louis Park, the suction from a wading pool drain literally ripped out six-year-old Abigail's insides. She had transplant surgery at a Nebraska hospital to get a new small bowel, liver, and pancreas. She had one setback after another, undergoing 16 more surgeries. SIXTEEN!

Then at the beginning of this month she began chemotherapy for a rare cancer associated with transplants called posttransplant lymphoprolipherative disease, or PTLD. It affects some blood cells.

Abigail's parents are in the midst of suing the golf club and the company that manufactured the pool drain.

After Scott and Katey Taylor campaigned for new legislation regulating safety of pool drains, a new law was passed in Congress banning all manufacture, distribution, and sale of drain covers that don't meet anti-entrapment standards. The bill is named after Virginia Graeme Baker, a seven-year-old who was pinned to the bottom of a pool and drowned in 2002.

I vaguely remember reading about a story similar to this in some medical oddities book a few years ago. It was weird and sort of gross and amusing then. It's not so much anymore.