A family’s cosy movie night took a terrible turn when a quick trip to Asda for snacks ended in disaster. Samantha Rylance, 25, visited the Asda store in Liscard with her partner Callum and their two children for some treats on Saturday, December 7.
Samantha from Seacombe, Wirral told the Liverpool ECHO how their youngest son, Kaelen, was playing in an aisle and collided with a roll cage, resulting in a nasty gash on his head. The six-year-old then suffered a severe head injury that required immediate hospital attention.
Reliving the ordeal, Samantha expressed her immense gratitude towards the “amazing” Asda staff who rushed to assist her family in the emergency. She said: “It was a nightmare. [Kaelen] was messing about in the aisle, running up and down.
“He had run and turned around to look at me and his dad and had not seen the cage and ran straight into it. He bounced off it – it was one of the big roll cages – and smacked his head.”
Detailing the moment she realised the severity of her son’s injury, she continued: “I didn’t know how bad it was at first, it was his dad, Callum, who picked him up and shouted to me ‘his head.’ He brought him over to me shouting Sam ‘his head,’ it looked like a scene out of a horror film. There was no skin, his head was just red with blood, it poured with blood.”
In a panic, Samantha, who is pregnant, acted swiftly to get help for her son. She said: “I just scooped him up, bearing in mind I’m 23 weeks pregnant, and ran with him. There was a trail of blood behind us, I was screaming for people to move out of our way.
“We ran to the pharmacy [inside Asda]. The woman in the pharmacy stopped serving everyone to help, she was amazing.” Samantha said she “couldn’t function”.
The mum added: “My hands froze. She kept telling me to hold the cloth [to put pressure on the wound] but I couldn’t hold them. My brain went to mush, it was my worst nightmare.”
She elaborated on the simple family plans that had led them to Asda, saying, “We had only gone in for some snacks. We’d planned on having a family movie night so we went to Asda to get some snacks to watch a film with and get some pyjamas. All Kaelen wanted was some strawberries but he didn’t manage to do that.”
Expressing her thanks to everyone who helped, Samantha said: “Everyone was amazing. The security guard helped calm my eldest son [Leighton-John, eight] who is autistic and was freaking out. He rang the ambulance and was lovely and the pharmacist was amazing.”