Swim Race and Rescue?

I will continue the stereotypes series tomorrow. Tomorrow's post will be about the “validity” of stereotypes. I will be looking at the question of “where do they come from?”

Today, I want to tell you about my yesterday.

Yesterday was the Pier-to-Pier swim race. This is a 2-mile swim race in the ocean. I did not swim in it because I prefer swimming in a pool to swimming in the ocean; however, a family friend hired me to paddle a surfboard in front of him during the race. This makes it so he doesn't have to look up and get his bearing every few minutes.

This is a fairly easy job. The hardest part is finding your swimmer out of the 1200 other swimmers. The system that my swimmer and I worked out was that I would have an American flag and wave it around and he would find me. The only problem was that I don't own a small American flag, so I had to make a makeshift flag from a shirt. I chose a pink shirt that I have never worn and will never wear, but now I'm out there waving a pink flag around. To be honest, it felt very gay. Maybe next year I should just get the LGBT flag out and see how many stares I get. :D

Yesterday, we had an almost-rescue at work. I was guarding the little pool, and my coworker was watching the big pool/diving board when a kid jumped off the diving board, slowly floated to the surface, and then lay on his side without moving.

My coworker ran over and start asking the kid if he was OK. Twice, he didn't respond. My coworker was on the verge of entering the water when he finally responded to the third call.

Now, this doesn't sound very terrifying, but it really is, and allow me to explain why. If he had not responded that third time, she would have had to enter the water. This would not be an ordinary rescue that involves dragging the victim to the side. No, this would have been a suspected spinal injury.

In a suspected spinal injury, every guard on the pool deck gets involved. The procedure would have gone something like this:

- Coworker enters the water. She doesn't dive in, but slowly lowers herself in.
- I blow my whistle and order that everyone exit the water.
- I grab the backboard and slowly enter the water.
- She puts the victim into a headlock-type-hold that prevents his head or neck from moving and begins to move him to the shallow end.
- She must keep him moving at all times in order to prevent his legs from dropping
- I come up and sink the backboard underneath the victim and slowly raise it so that he is positioned perfectly upon it. This occurs while we are moving because we cannot let his legs drop.
- My coworker and I then go about strapping the victim in
- Finally, we extract him from the water and the paramedics take him to the hospital.

As you can see, it is a complicated and risky operation. This is easily the most difficult thing a lifeguard will ever deal with. The worst part is that if we screw up, the victim's family will sue the pants off us.

Fortunately, this kid was just faking it, and we averted an incident. Nevertheless, my coworkers was visibly shaken.