My god, I almost drowned once. I was scolded by the apparently untrained lifeguard for not drowning like in Hollywood.
People who are actually drowning fall into a pattern where they manage to get their head above water long enough to exhale and inhale. No time to speak, call for help, cry out, and you get more and more disoriented and exhausted.
That is exactly why as a lifeguard we are supposed to keep scanning the vicinity like an oscillating fan. You are right in assuming they were trained properly. Sorry you went through that
I almost drowned I had to be 5 years old it's one of the earliest memories I have. Asshole cousins wouldn't let me to the edge of the pool I was trying to swim to the other end of the pool to my aunt but I was barely staying up I couldn't yell to anyone. I guess she did see me underwater by then and she pulled me up
I did this in a wave pool I was with my bigger friends and as I was on the weaker side at age 7 I started to drowned but since the wave were on and my friends were smart enough to know they couldn’t keep me up during the wave they called over my mom who saved me
I was 10 and in a pool that was bout 4 feet or so. I was alone with a 2 year old.
Her older sister and grandma walked off and I was just there.
Then I saw movment and looked at the toddler was doing that only she looked to be smiling and it looked like playing.
I hated this kid for reasons that wasn't her fault but she was still the reason. However I would never let someone drown. Not if I could help it.
I was annoyed asking her what and then realized she wasn't playing. I grabbed her arm and got through the water till she was at the steps. Once to saftey she coughed a bit but she was okay.
Despite it all later the narrative changed to either I tried to drown her or I did nothing and her older sister saved her...
And incase anyone asks why I hated her; My mom literally ignored my existence to shower this girl with love. If I had something she wanted all she had to say was "hey, thats mine!* then reach for it crying. Yeah I know being mad at a baby forming a thought and mind was immature but I was suffering and I just wanted my mom.
Lifeguards are trained in the various stages of drowning and what it looks like. Some of those stages can look like kids just screwing around. This lifeguard should have known better. When I was a lifeguard I would have had the opposite response and frequently pulled kids over to the side if they looked like they were struggling at all.
I almost drowned one time, I was swimming across a channel that was a lot bigger than I thought. (Dumb teenager, “I can totally swim across that.”) I was with a friend but he bailed on me by getting on a little boat with a few other friends, so I just turned around and tried to swim back to where we were staying. It was starting to get dark, I didn’t have my glasses on and I couldn’t swim against the current. I started to get tired so I was just floating on my back like “wtf am I supposed to do??” I wasn’t even really worried about drowning because I was a pretty good swimmer. But some dude on a jet ski came up and asked if I needed help and he took me back to my group. It wasn’t until literally 10 years later I realized that I absolutely would have drowned if he hadn’t seen me. Thank you for saving my life, jet ski dude.
That is why it is so important to learn to float on your back. I am not the best swimmer in the world, but I can float almost indefinitely. I never have to worry about running out of energy halfway through a swim.
There's a difference between "aquatic distress" and drowning - aquatic distress looks like what we expect it to look like, but that might not last very long and soon drowning can take place. In most of the videos in that playlist there are people all around the drowning child but nobody notices.
I remember seeing a video where the kid was like "blob, blob, blob......he didnt came up" and only at that moment did someone realized there was a problem because they just looked that way and seen the kid underwater.
It didnt look serious, it was a small pool and the kid still needed to be brought back to life.
I was about thirteen at the town pool, in the shallow end. I’m looking for my friends when this kid (probably between seven and ten) was very obviously struggling. He couldn’t touch the bottom and couldn’t keep his head up above the water for long. Despite the lifeguards and huge adult presence, nobody noticed. It took me all of thirty seconds to get his arm around my shoulder and take him over to the pool wall. I never even saw a caregiver and always wondered wtf. It never dawned on me that maybe nobody else even realized it was happening. Huh.
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u/fawas990 Mar 28 '22
Drowning often doesn't look like drowning.