When Australian Ally Langdon talked to a mother and father who had to make the hard decision to end the life of their young child, whom they had given birth to 13 years before, she couldn’t hide her pain.
Langdon, who is also a mother, tried not to cry when she saw the little girl die after giving in to the popular chroming trend.
People like Andrea and Paul Haynes talked on Ally Langdon’s show A Current Affair about how their 13-year-old daughter Esra Haynes died after taking part in the popular but dangerous chemical inhalation trend called “chroming.”
The young athlete Esra raced BMX bikes with her siblings and co-led the Montrose Football Netball Club. Her teammates said she was “determined, fun, cheeky, and talented.” In Queensland, Esra also led her team to a national aerobics title.
At a friend’s house on March 31, Esra had a sleepover and wanted to get high. She sniffed an aerosol deodorant can to get high. Because of this, she had a heart attack and permanent brain damage.
“It was just her normal thing to do, which was to hang out with her friends,” her mom Andrea told Langdon. Paul, her dad, said, “We always knew where she was and who she was with.” There was nothing strange about it…It was one of the worst phone calls a parent could ever get, and we got it: “Come get your daughter.”
Langdon says Esra’s friends thought she was having a panic attack, but “after inhaling deodorant, her body was actually starting to shut down; she was in cardiac arrest, and no one at the sleepover used cardiac arrest.”
Andrea arrived just as Esra was being brought back to life. The paramedics told Andrea’s mother that her daughter had been chroming, which Andrea had never heard of.
Esra was rushed to the hospital so that they could be sure their baby daughter would get better. She did have a strong heart and lungs, so maybe she would make it.
Paul and Andrea said that Esra’s brain injury was “beyond repair,” so after eight days on life support, they had to put the machine to sleep. Her parents talked about how painful it was to kill their daughter while having trouble speaking and remembering their saddest day.
When asked to take Esra’s family and friends to the hospital to say their last goodbyes, her dad said, “It was a very, very hard thing to do to such a young soul.” We could lie down with her because she was put on a bed. We held her close until the end.
Langdon, a mother of two young children, couldn’t hold back her tears when she saw how sad the parents were. In the first week of April, Esra died. Paul says that Imogen, Seth, and Charlie are “shattered” and the whole family is “broken” because of it.
“Really terrible, terrible for everyone, including all of her friends,” Paul said. “This has been the worst and most difficult time for any parent to go through.” Our sleep, food, and smiles have been missing, and we haven’t been ourselves…But it hasn’t just hurt us; it’s hurt the whole community.
Paul and his wife had never heard of chroming before it killed their daughter. Now they want more people to know about this dangerous viral trend that is becoming more and more popular among teens and can be done with common household items like deodorant, paint, hairspray, or even permanent markers.
In an interview with a local news station, Paul said he felt bad that he didn’t know about chroming when Esra was still alive and could have told her about the risks: “If we knew more about it and the word got out, we would have had the conversation at our kitchen table for sure.”
“We need to kick it up a notch and let these kids get the news directly from sources other than friends and social media. That way, they’ll get the right advice right away.”
Paul wants to teach parents how to make things better for their kids and maybe even save them. their children.
What parents need to do is have a conversation with their kids and start the conversation off on a good note. There was no way we could have known what was going on.
Since 2009, many children have died in Australia and other places around the world because of the troubling chroming trend. A lot of young people like to chrome because it’s a quick way to get high. It can cause organ failure, seizures, heart attacks, suffocation, and sudden death by smell.
“We’ll never forget the pictures in our minds of what we saw,” Paul told Langdon. “They tore out our gut.”
What a terrible thing it must be for a family to choose to take their child off of life support. The Haynes family and all of Esra’s loved ones are in our thoughts and prayers.
By telling everyone you know about this story, you may help parents save their kids’ lives by letting them know about the dangers of this terrible trend.