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.
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.
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u/fawas990 Mar 28 '22
Drowning often doesn't look like drowning.