To be so angry that my baby could have died and no emergency service could reach us

[CountryMummy1]

My 14 month old baby had a severe episode of croup a few nights ago, so bad that he went blue and floppy. We were at my parents house in Wales and had to phone the ambulance. It took them 2 hours to locate us as the road that leads to the house was not in their map. It was the worst 2 hours of my life. When they eventually found us (from asking at other houses) they discovered that they couldn't get the ambulance down our road so they had to run up.

DS was so bad that my husband had to drive him, me and the 2 ambulance men down the road back to the ambulance.

Obviously I can't risk this ever happening again as my parents are now elderly. Having phoned the council I have found out that it is classed as an unadopted footpath?? Surely this can't be right if it is the only vehicle access to the property. What on earth do i do now?

I know you have to take bins to the end of tracks, but that's not what OP described - she said her parents take their rubbish to a local campsite and put it in the bins there. Ie, no bin collection at all.

The dispatcher told us not to drive as it would take us 1.5 hours and if the baby stopped breathing on the way we would be in a worse state as they would never have found us

Saz - I have asthma and as we were a while away from the hospital (pre 90's so there was no ambulance station) my gp organised a nebuliser for me - it saved loads of trips to the hospital - see if you can get one at home?

I'm a teacher and we were told at a recent training that if we were going anywhere rural to give 999 the OS grid reference as they'd be able to locate.

So many emergency vehicles come from central locations they don't know the local areas so we now.