It was a holiday weekend nearly two years ago. I decided to take my family into the downtown area about an hour from our home to get away for a bit.
I have a large family and hotel pools are always a draw. After an hour or two at the pool, the kids started getting out and toweling off. Our three-year-old took his life jacket off to to dry himself and my wife and I started gathering our things. Some of the kids were still in the hot tub so we weren’t exactly in a rush.
After what felt like a very short period of time, my wife says “Where’s Zach?” in that motherly-urgent tone. Just as my eyes focused on the pool, I heard a shriek from my wife unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my life. There is our three-year-old boy, face down in the pool, absolutely still.
I jumped in the pool and pulled him into my arms and set him on the deck on the opposite side of the pool. To this day I have no idea how I climbed out of that pool with him in my arms but I was in and out of that pool seconds. As I looked down at him - he was this awful, unnatural color and I knew we were in a very serious situation.
I’m not a trained medical professional. Like most, I’ve had training on how to handle various emergency situations here and there, but nothing extensive. As I looked down at my still and lifeless son, I realized that the decisions I made in the next minute may be the difference between life and death. And I didn’t really know what I was doing.
I’ve been in stressful situations before, but nothing like this. It was as if I was plucked from reality and placed into some type of metaphysical reality. I don’t know how to describe it. In some ways, I became incredibly focused. In other ways, I was completely dazed and confused.
A couple things came to mind. 1) Call 911. 2) Administer CPR. I yelled out to my oldest teenage daughter to call 911. I told her to call from the hotel phone. Again - in this moment my thoughts were very scattered but I remember thinking that would be the most certain way to relay our location automatically. I had no idea the address or even the street we were on. At that moment I sincerely couldn’t say for certain if we were at the Hyatt, Hilton, Holiday or Hampton. If it was the Hyatt was it the Grand Hyatt, Hyatt Place or just the regular Hyatt? In my mind at least this though was clear: call from a land line and tell them to come and they will come even if you can’t tell them where you are.
I began to administer CPR to my son. Was it breaths or then compressions, or the other way around? How many breaths? How many compressions? How long to I wait to see if he’s got a pulse? The adrenaline is so high there was no way I’d be able to distinguish a pulse with my shaking hands. I gave a couple breaths and started compressions. He was absolutely still. I hoped for the Hollywood-like water puke, cough. I got nothing. Repeat breaths, compressions. Nothing. Repeat. Nothing.
I don’t know how much time had passed, but it felt like an eternity. Why wasn’t he responding to my actions?? Desperation quickly settled in - I don’t know what I’m doing and he will probably die because of it. More than ever I felt a desperate need of help.
I look up and see my daughter scrambling around, still in the pool area. My wife is next to me, trying to help me administer. I scream out to my daughter in absolute desperation “you have to call 911 NOW!” My attention goes back to my son. Breaths. Compressions. Anything? No. Repeat.
The scene around me was absolute mayhem. My other children, of various ages, were letting out blood curdling screams and moans. Whenever I bring myself back to the moment, it brings tears to my eyes. The kids didn’t know exactly what was happening, but they knew this was very, very bad.
The daughter I had instructed to call 911 is very calculated, precise and responsible. I had told her to call 911 from a hotel phone because it was my thought that it was the best (only?) way to reliably provide our location to the responders. She was trying to do exactly that. But the problem was she was locked out of the hotel. She was fumbling through our towels and bags looking for the key card to her her back into the building. She couldn’t find it. It turns out it was in a very natural and obvious spot - my pocket - but in a moment like that, simple things are not always clear. I don’t realize it was in my pocket. She thought it was with our stuff and was digging to find it. In hindsight, I should have told her to call from her cell phone while looking for a hotel phone.
I’m desperate. Help is not coming. What I’m doing doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Every tick of the clock the situation is getting worse. Tunnel vision was setting in. I cannot property articulate the feeing of absolute terror and paralysis that was setting in. “This is actually happening.”
I don’t remember how, but eventually the key issue was resolved and my daughter got into the hotel and began her sprint to the front desk. She was met by the staff part way there. “911 is on the way”, they said. What? Why? We never called.
It turns out, an off duty airline pilot was summoned to the window of his room due to the screaming below. Observing the situation, he summoned help. Around the same time, a nurse was checking into the hotel and had been told her room was not ready. She later told me she was frustrated and decided to take a walk. She passed by the pool area and came to our attention and started helping while the ambulance was making its way to us. At his point, I heard a faint - oh so faint - whimper from my son. Details are fuzzy to me at this point, but 911 arrived and whisked him off to the nearby children’s hospital.
We spent a couple of days at the hospital. He made a full recovery and we were sent home with much gratitude, forever changed by the situation. I know these stories like this so often do not have a happy ending, and I am so, so sorry for the families and loved ones of those who experience other outcomes.
A few thoughts that came to my mind after this experience.
- A mobile phone has the ability to relay location very reliably, and more precisely than a phone registered to an address. A hotel is a big building - sure they might have guessed we were by the pool, but do the first responders know where in a massive hotel the pool is? Seconds matter. It sure would have been nice to know that all I had to do is call 911 from my mobile phone and say “please come” and they could respond with “we are on our way”.
- I thought it would be helpful to have a 100% offline-capable, blazing fast, dead simple app with common emergency situations and what basic steps to take. In the state I was in, I’m not sure I would have thought to go to an app. But perhaps a bystander with such an app, even untrained, could use such an app to help coach a situation.
- Why on earth was there no phone outside by the hotel pool? You won’t be surprised to know this particular hotel solved that problem.
- This all unfolded within our “field of vision”. Our backs were not turned when our son went in the water. But we were focused on gathering our stuff, chatting with each other and just weren’t paying attention. We are different at pools now.
- I’ve wondered if some type of device could be strapped to a toddler’s head that would sound off a close-by alarm if submerged for more than x seconds or of the device was removed. It would have to avoid going off with common splashes and quick dunks in the water. As I’ve carefully observed since, the forehead seems like a logical position for such a sensor. Little ones don’t go in below their forehead often for much longer than a few seconds, and in a drowning situation the forehead is always submerged. I fear that such a device, however, would provide aflame sense of security and perhaps would encourage worse supervision.
I am very much looking forward to the day when I can be confident my mobile phone can relay my precise location to emergency responders.