Firefighters reunited 18 years later with boy they thought had died

August long weekend1999:that's when Vancouver fire crews responded to a call of a suspected drowning at 41st Avenue and GranvilleStreet.

Fourteen-month-old Will Kenny was in the family pool, according to his mother, Letitia Vogel.

"It's not a story that Will really remembers, but it's a story that I think about a lot,"said Vogel.

Vancouver firefighter Capt. John Appleby, along with Patrick Summer and others attended to the scene.

Appleby says he started performing CPR on baby Will soon after he arrived.

The child started breathing and was rushed off in an ambulance, but in the Sunday paper he read that Will had later died.

"We didn't say a lot about it, but we did acknowledge that we'd heard he hadn't made it. We'd made our best effort sort of thing. If you do this job for any length of time you carry a lot of that negative stuff with you," said Appleby.

But as it turns out, the report was wrong.

"It never occurred to me that the firefighters who had been on scene didn't know the positive outcome. I had known that it was reported in the news that he had passed away, but it never occurred to me that they hadn't found out,"said Vogel.

When Vogel's cousin who is a Burnaby firefighter heard how intense the rescue was, he said he asked if the firefighters had known that Will survived.

From his own experience of not knowing patients' outcomes, he set out to let them know.

And 18 years laterthe now retired Appleby and his fellow firefighters on duty that day found out young Will is alive, well and studying engineering at the University of Waterloo.

"It's funny I remember a conversation, he was talking to me about this incident he'd heard about and he was giving me the details, and I said 'Well, no, that's not the way it happened cause that child didn't survive', and he says 'oh, yes he did,"said Appleby.

On Friday at Fire Hall No. 21, not far from where they first met nearly two decades ago, Will and his mother had a chance to say thank you to the first responders who helped save his life.

"I apologized for not being aware enough to make an effort to let them know that the story turned out to have a good ending, and not the bad ending,"said Vogel.

"I met one of the firefighter's wife and children and I hugged them all and apologized cause I'm sure for 17 years they've looked at their own children grow and felt badly that perhaps I didn't have one, but I did, and I felt bad for that."

Still working as a firefighter, Summer said he had just been on the job for two years at the time, and had one young child and another on the way.

He said his kids always wondered why they didn't have a pool in the backyard.

"Just knowing that Will had survived was kind of like a huge relief ... it was a gift,"said Summer.

Appleby says it's always crushing when you don't make that difference, so it's nice to hear a positive story.

"Every time you have a good outcome it really makes your life a lot easier to deal with doesn't it."