I Nearly Drowned When I Was 11

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Talking about the fatal drowning of 5 people in Ohio made me remember my near drowning experience I was at a Girl Scout camp. Just for the day — not overnight. My two best friends wanted us to jump off the diving board into the deep end. I wasn’t a great swimmer then but I could swim okay. I can’t swim at all now When I hit the water after jumping into the deep end, something happened. I got disoriented or something. My brain wouldn’t work. I was confused. I couldn’t figure out the need to swim to the side of the pool. I was drowning. I kept bobbing back under the water and swallowing water My friend Laura was already in the water so she swam over to help me. I guess I was panicking because I kept dragging her down under the water with me. She swam away to save herself. This is what @xfiacre was talking about as the first rule of lifesaving is to not jump in to save someone unless you have no other choice At some point an adult woman with long brown hair jumped in and wrangled me so that I couldn’t drag her under and got me out of the pool somehow. The teenage lifeguard never saw any of this happening