Texas 4-year-old dies of ‘dry drowning’ days after swim trip

A 4-year-old boy near Houston died Saturday of breathing complications that resulted from swimming days earlier, KHOU-TV reports.

Francisco “Frankie” Delgado Jr. suffered “dry drowning,” a rare condition in which fluids inhaled from swimming build up around the lungs and heart, doctors told his family.

Dry drowning occurs when the inhalation of water leads to a constriction of muscles in the airway, Dr. Purva Grover, a pediatrician at the Cleveland Clinic, said in a post on the clinic’s website.

The condition is most common in children because of their small size, Dr. Raymond Pitetti at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh told WebMD. Dr. James Orlowski, a pediatrician at Florida Hospital Tampa, told WebMD that dry drowning and secondary drowning, a similar condition, make up about 1 to 2 percent of all drowning incidents.

Symptoms for both conditions are the same and include coughing, chest pain and fatigue.

Delgado had shown symptoms of vomiting and diarrhea for several days after returning from a swim trip, and then he stopped breathing, his family said.

“Out of nowhere, he just woke up. He said, ‘ahhh,’ ” his father told KTRK-TV. “He took his last breath, and I didn’t know what to do no more.”

A GoFundMe page for Delgado’s funeral expenses had raised more than $12,000 by Wednesday.

“He had so much life to live,” the page says. “He was loved by so many people, his love for Baseball was endless. The world lost a beautiful soul.”

This story was originally published June 7, 2017 at 1:09 PM with the headline "Texas 4-year-old dies of ‘dry drowning’ days after swim trip."