Comment by sixdimensional | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixdimensional | Hacker News Reader

When I was about 7 years old, I went to a birthday pool party at a friend's house. I did not know how to swim, and was just standing near the pool, when some other kids pushed me in. I fell in the deep end of the pool, and I had the exact experience described in terms of the drowning response on that site. The other kids didn't know I couldn't swim and assumed I was fine.

I nearly died that day - I tried as hard as I could to put my arms above the water and wave and yell, but I couldn't do much, and I don't really know what happened much after that. Everything went black. For a moment I felt a person touch me underwater, and then it was all black.

I woke up on the concrete next to the pool. I found out later that one of my other classmates had tried to rescue me by pulling me from the pool, but wasn't strong enough to pull me out. His sister, who was older and stronger, had been a lifeguard, dove in and pulled me out. My friend's father was a doctor, and had resuscitated me. They literally saved my life.

To this day, I'm 33, I can swim fine, but I still remember that experience like it was yesterday. I guess those things tend to stick. Whenever I am around a pool, I can't help but try to keep an eye out for people & children, just in case. I saw this one in 0.78s.

This site/video is a really good public safety announcement, especially since the weather just keeps getting hotter and more and more are bound for the pool. Thank goodness for the lifeguard in the video, and all our protectors out there.

Yeah so one of the weird things is that you can't yell when you're drowning. It's not something I'd expect if I didn't know better, I'd expect to at least be able to get some shouts and screams off but it's not actually like that.

In fact I was once swimming with the son of my dad's best friend in his teens, we'd only seen each other once before as our parents lived in different countries after they married. And somehow he went deep into the sea, and at some point I looked back and saw him flapping about. I must've been 15 or so at the time but somehow even though he didn't yell or scream, and even though we'd been pretty far from the beach for like a solid 5-10 minutes (giving me the impression he had no problem swimming), I got the impression he was drowning. I'm glad I responded, but looking back it felt awkward and it wasn't a clear cut situation where you feel this heroic impulse. I didn't know him very well, he was 2-3 years older than me and bigger, and he didn't indicate to me he had issues swimming, maybe he was just playing around (just like my gf likes to lay in pools face down for like a minute at a time, which looks way more suspicious of drowning!), I really didn't want to go up to him and hold him and find out he was totally fine, it'd just be really embarrassing, as if some kid a few years younger has to rescue him at sea. Either way despite him not yelling or anything, I did swim over and grabbed him and he started pushing me down violently as if I was a floatation device, so from there it was pretty clear, and we slowly made it back to the beach and he kept thanking me for years after everytime I see him. I tried to use the rescue techniques I'd learned as a child, to have someone float on your chest basically but that totally failed in the moment and I couldn't create a moment of control to calm him down and instruct him, I just did my best to swim up and to the beach. He basically pushed me down every other second, and then I'd swim up and catch a breather as best as possible, and somehow we made it back like that. Totally exhausted and out of breath right after, can't imagine how he must've felt.

I can definitely appreciate your story. Thank you for your heroic action - people like you are like the people who saved my life. I'd say better safe than sorry, but your story also shows the other flip side - you have to be careful as a rescuer as well.

The explanation on the linked website talks about how it can be difficult (and very dangerous) also for the rescuer, with the person grasping for life. I remember the initial panic I felt when I nearly drowned, but with nobody immediately around me, the panic was short and then followed by blackness as I fell unconscious.

Your story clearly points to the - how do I say it - lack of clarity when someone is drowning or not, and the dangers of rescuing as well. A person in that state of panic is simply in pure fight-or-flight mode trying to survive and that can be quite dangerous to rescuers.

as an aside - there's actually multiple videos (not sure how many), so you can play repeatedly

27. Videos are hosted on youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/LifeguardRescue11/videos), so you can easily watch them in sequence.

For me, the second video was different but it kept repeating, so after 6 tries I quit. Also, it's impossible to navigate back to a sequence of the video, so I couldn't train to see when the child started to go wrong. There's also no link to Youtube. And finally on the iPad the background is black and the video is black and doesn't start, so I really wondered what the website was about at the beginning. Typical example of how doing less design and not removing Youtube's default controls would have helped. The rest of the website is a great idea implemented with talent, despite the details I teport.

There's only 6 used by the game thus far: https://github.com/FrankSalad/spot-the-drowning-child/blob/1...

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