Traumatic experience has led MSP to urge others to get proper training

MSP and former Aberlour policy manager Alex Cole Hamilton said first aid training from 25 years ago saved the life of his daughter after she swallowed a coin.

Father of three Cole-Hamilton, who was also a board member at the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, said instinct kicked in when he realised his daughter Darcy had stopped breathing.

The Liberal Democrat MSP for Edinburgh Western, was at home on Saturday when she started choking and stopped breathing just as he was heading out.

By turning her upside down and slapping her back until she was sick, he managed to get her breathing again before she was rushed to hospital in an ambulance, where the coin was removed under general anaesthetic.

She has now made a full recovery.

“Darcy was in her jammies in the kitchen, watching kids stuff on YouTube on the computer,” he said. “She just made this sort of strangled cry, and I dashed through and caught her saying the words ‘I’ve swallowed a coin’. Then she stopped breathing and changed colour. “I’d done first aid when I was training to be a scuba diver 25 years ago, and understood a bit about choking through our NCT classes we did when we first had kids.”

Cole-Hamilton, who is the Lib Dems health spokesperson, added: “I got her back to her feet and she was still retching a lot, but audibly breathing, so I dialled 999. They were here in seven or eight minutes and blue-lighted us to the Sick Kids [hospital].

“It was all really swift. They took an x-ray and got her into theatre probably an hour after we got to the hospital, gave her a general anaesthetic and got it out. We had her back within half an hour.”

The MSP said that by Sunday afternoon Darcy was already “bothering her brothers like nothing’s happened” and “eating like a horse.”

He says he now wants to raise awareness about choking and how to respond after many of his followers on social media said they wouldn’t have known what to do.