A mother who resuscitated her son when he was moments from death as a baby has watched him marry his teenage sweetheart 28 years later.

Elaine Milne’s five-month-old daughter Megan died in 1987 from cot death and she walked in to find her son Luis “turning grey” just one year on in 1988.

The 62-year-old watched newlyweds Luis and Emily White, both from Snodland, tie the knot at Cooling Castle on Monday more than two decades on from appearing on the front of the Kent Messenger.

Elaine, of Chapel Close, said: “My daughter Megan was a cot death at nearly six months old. When Luis was 12 weeks old he stopped breathing and I had to resuscitate him.

“We had a monitor which you could only hear if he was awake and it went off at 6am so I went over to pick him up and he was going grey.”

Market researcher Elaine and her miracle son, now 28, hit the headlines when the family’s social club helped buy a more advanced monitor.

The grandmother-of-four said: “None of my children had any breathing problems and you don’t know what caused it because cot death just comes out of the blue.

“There was a more sophisticated oxygen monitor but there was a waiting list and they cost more than £1,000.

“We were in the paper in 1988 because the leader at the YMCA in Loose raised the money. Luis was in the paper again for his first birthday because that was a milestone in itself.”

Elaine helped set up a cot death support group after daughter Megan’s death and Luis’s near miss. Her anxiety about Luis went away once he was walking and calling aged of one.

Father-of-two Luis attended St Simon Stock secondary school at Oakwood Park and now works as an electrician.

Elaine added: “Once you get to the stage of the baby getting bigger and calling you, you
can relax a little more but before that you are very protective.

“Once they are nine months to a year old everything is fine. From then on there were no problems and Luis grew up to be a typical boy.

“Luis met Emily when he was 16 and she was 15 and the wedding on Monday was absolutely beautiful and the rain even stopped for it.”