How doctors saved little Lief Pereira after drowning

When Melina Pereira pulled her boy’s blue body from the family’s pool, she feared the worst. What happened next, even his doctor has described as a miracle.

When a Melbourne toddler drowned in his family’s pool, his parents spent December at his bedside, preparing to say goodbye to their beloved son.

But, just 17 days after a distraught mum pulled her 2-year-old son’s blue body from the water, the boy who doctors had feared may never wake up, left Monash Children’s Hospital in time for Christmas.

The pediatric intensive care unit acting director Dr Sunit Matha does not like to use the word ‘miracle’.

But he says it was hard to call the recovery of Liefling “Lief” Pereira in December 2022 anything else, “especially for it to happen during the Christmas time”.

“When I first saw him in the emergency department, I was worried,” he said.

Melina and Eddie Pereira with Lief, now 4. Picture: Jason Edwards

The truth of the matter was Lief was saved by many miracles - one for each of the endless list of people - from his parents to the first responders and the hospital staff - who dropped everything to help a little boy take one more breath.

It was December 4 2022, and Melina Pereira was feeding her new baby - while her husband Eddie and older sons used the chainsaw outside - when she realised Lief was missing.

To this day, she does not know how he got into the fenced-off pool — if the gate was left ajar after the family’s earlier swim or somehow opened — but something made her check.

To her horror, she found Lief — floating in the pool at their Harkaway home.

She said she dived into the water and pulled him out with one hand, while “frantically just doing chest compressions with the other” and screaming for help.

The rest of the family came running and Mr Pereira, who had recent first aid training, took over compressions for what he said “felt like an eternity”.

“I revived him twice, but there was no pulse,” he said.

But within about 10 minutes emergency services began to arrive — until there were so many firefighters, police and paramedics they filled the court — and Lief was raced to Monash Children’s Hospital.

He was placed on life support and put into an induced coma — allowing his brain to rest - but doctors feared, even if he somehow survived, he would have major brain damage.

Leif recovering at the Monash Children’s Hospital

Mrs Pereira said they thought they would lose him, and were trying to prepare for the moment they would need to turn off his life support.

“We had six days of complete uncertainty, which was horrific,” she said.

But then Mrs Pereira said a stunned doctor told her — while not out of the woods entirely — Lief’s brain scans had just come back showing no injuries.

“He said I don’t have words to explain how this is possible,” she said.

She said the doctor — so surprised he had first checked the report was not a mistake - told her they could start to slowly wake Lief from his coma, and he made “enormous progress” each day.

“It was like watching all the light switches slowly come back on,” she said.

Mr Pereira said he knew his son would be okay when — after 10 days in various hospital rooms — Lief went outside for the first time.

“It was 8 o’clock in the morning and he was just running around,” he said.

“I just knew that he was going to be good.”

Olivier, 14,, Melina with Leifling, 4, Zander, 17, Eddie holding Reinhardt, 2, Kepler, 11 and Tiaan, 19. Picture: Talking Portraits

Mrs Pereira said doctors and nurses started dropping into Lief’s room “one by one to see him”.

“They just couldn’t believe that this little boy who was on death’s door was standing up and starting to walk,” she said.

“They said, we see so many of these every year, and nobody walks out, but Leif walked out of that hospital three weeks later.”

He went home on December 21, just in time for Christmas and for the family of the eight to decorate their tree — which had stood bare all those weeks - now they were finally together again.

Mrs Pereira said they were “eternally grateful” and Lief, now 4, was a happy, healthy kid with no fear of water and - aside from a slightly slower speech - could do everything a normal child his age could do.

The family could not speak more highly of the Monash staff, from the nurse they watched stroke Life’s hair in emergency as a team of thirty people worked to save him, to the ones in intensive care who spent hours by their side, even bringing them a home cooked dinner one night.

It’s why they have shared their story today for Monash’s Christmas Appeal, determined to help them raise funds to purchase another one of the very machines - an advanced, highly specialised ventilator - that helped save Lief.

Dr Matha, who still remembers the team’s joy when a recovering Lief wanted a bottle of apple juice like any “typical” child, encouraged people to donate what they could.

“We want to cater to specific needs, and it’s that peace of mind of having the best technology that is out there in the world, to have it available to the most vulnerable lungs and most vulnerable patients that we see,” he said.

“It is not just a piece of equipment, it is a lifeline for our youngest and most fragile patients.”

Donate: at Monash Health or by phone at [phone]