[Mindless2112]

I spent a couple of summers as a lifeguard at a college swimming pool, and I have seen this first-hand.

As a lifeguard, I was well trained in how to rescue but not particularly well trained in how to recognize a drowning victim. There was a time I watched a boy bobbing up and down in the water, looking upward, mouth open, but not appearing to gasp for breath, the whole time wondering if he was in trouble. Luckily he was less than two yards from his mother, and she eventually picked him up. (Also luckily for me, she didn't think anything of it, or I might have been in trouble -- she probably didn't recognize that he was actually drowning either!) Only when I read the original publication of this article was I certain that he had been drowning at the time.

A side-note so that I don't seem like a complete abomination of a lifeguard: I did save a drowning victim at that pool. She displayed the TV-portrayed signs of drowning after jumping off the diving board with no idea how to swim. Probably due to the adrenaline rush, the rescue is a bit fuzzy, but that's where the lifeguard training kicks in.

[mistercow]

>She displayed the TV-portrayed signs of drowning after jumping off the diving board with no idea how to swim. Probably due to the adrenaline rush, the rescue is a bit fuzzy, but that's where the lifeguard training kicks in.

My guess is that the reason was that she was not drowning yet. She probably would have if you hadn't saved her, but in her case she had a few pre-drowning moments in which to react. The difference would be that she consciously knew that she was screwed as soon as she was in the water, since she didn't know how to swim.

[gmrple]

Yes, something most people don't know about drowning is that it is typically defined as the point at which breathing is interrupted and the person is mostly motionless, usually perpendicular to the surface of the water. Sometimes before beginning to drown a person will become a distressed swimmer, which is what people think of as stereotypical drowning behavior. People in this stage often need rescuing, but they are not drowning. The trick is that while people often go from distressed to drowning, people that are drowning may never go through the distressed stage.