New mom woke to find baby "blue and cold"—She knew exactly what to do

A new mom has described the moment she woke up to find her newborn daughter "blue and cold" and what she did next.

Layna Wells, of Missouri, said there was nothing out of the ordinary about that particular morning. She woke up at 5 a.m. to feed her 3-week-old daughter, Stevie, burped her, and held her for about 15 to 20 minutes before laying her back down to sleep.

Wells said it was around 7 a.m. when she next woke to every new parent's worst nightmare.

"I don't know why I woke up, but I did," she told Newsweek . "I rolled over to see my daughter blue and cold."

Unswaddling Stevie's limp, blue body, Wells immediately sprang into action.

"I immediately turned her over, did the five blows between the shoulders, turned her over again and did the compressions," she said.

That was when she noticed Stevie had started to breathe again.

"I started to aggressively massage her skin to make sure the blood was flowing properly, and that's when her eyes opened," Wells said. "She didn't cry."

Wells said Stevie was awake all the way to the ER but "never cried" during the journey.

"When they started checking her vitals and took her temperature, that's when she started to cry for the first time since CPR, and that was well over an hour later," Wells said.

She was diagnosed with a Brief Resolved Unexplained Event (BRUE).

A BRUE is a brief, unexplained episode in an infant that has resolved by the time medical care is sought. While the event can be frightening for parents, modern pediatric guidance views BRUE as distinct from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID), and most infants who experience a low-risk BRUE have excellent outcomes and are not at increased risk of sudden infant death.

Historically, a predecessor term called ALTE (Apparent Life-Threatening Event) was studied partly because doctors wondered whether it might be linked to SIDS. However, research over time found that most of these events were not precursors to SIDS , which led the American Academy of Pediatrics to replace ALTE with the more specific term BRUE in 2016.

"There was no reason for why it happened," Wells said. "Nothing clogged her airways. Her heart was healthy. Her oxygen levels were fine. Overall, she seemed healthy on all of her scans."

Though Wells administered CPR to Stevie at the time, she later realized she had done so "incorrectly." Nevertheless, it had the desired effect, with Wells saying doctors told her that "if it ever happens again, do exactly what you did."

The incident has haunted Wells ever since.

"It's by far the most gut-wrenching, horrible, nauseating experience I've ever lived through," she said. "I had a glimpse of what it would feel like to lose her, and I now have 10 seconds of a pain I'll forever be terrified to feel again."

There are still nights when she struggles to sleep with Stevie nearby.

"I just sit there and watch her breathe," she said. "Sometimes her breathing slows down and I go into immediate panic mode."

Wells hopes her story inspires other parents to learn infant CPR.

"You never think you're actually going to need to use it until suddenly you do, and in that moment you don't have time to Google what to do or second-guess yourself," she said.

However, she also believes she got "incredibly lucky" that morning.

"I happened to find my daughter when I did, I was able to react, and thankfully what I did worked," she said.

"I never want another parent to hear my story and think that if they had just checked one more time, known CPR better, or done something differently, their outcome would have been different. Sometimes parents do everything right and still experience an unimaginable loss. That is not a failure on their part."

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Rebecca Flood and Gray R. Thomas

Toddler Goes for Lunch With Mom, Hours Later Family's Nightmare Begins

Republicans Tell Supreme Court States Want to Force Kids Into Public School

Dad Eats One of His Kid's Candy Bars, Not Ready for Picture Son Sends Him