First, some great news to report: As of Jan. 2, six new lifeguards are on the line, well-trained, in shape and excited. I had planned to go into the details of this today, but the current events that I’ll be
First, some great news to report: As of Jan. 2, six new lifeguards are on the line, well-trained, in shape and excited. I had planned to go into the details of this today, but the current events that I’ll be describing took precedence.
The year 2008 has otherwise gotten off to a very rough start. We’ve already lost two visitors in our waters. On the other side of the ledger, we’ve had a number of quite miraculous rescues and saves. My friend Kalani Vierra, our lifeguard supervisor, told me that the “beaches have been packed with people” — and that’s the first and probably the most important key in our set-up for trouble.
This rough start can be demoralizing for all of us who are trying to make things better in ocean safety. For those of you who are reading this, allow me to be a cheerleader as I say “Hold the course, keep doing what you’re doing, thank you for doing it, and we’ll keep working on improving.”
What has impressed me in these events has been the amount of difference that just a few seconds can make. They can mean the difference between a family gratefully enjoying the rest of their Kaua‘i vacation together and then returning to their home with a dramatic story to share, versus the crushed remnants of a family plodding their sad way back to their home, daddy’s urn in hand. I’ll give you a taste of how these tales can unfold:
On Jan. 4 a visitor from Utah was noted to be lifeless in the water at Kalapaki. Alert fellow swimmers pulled him into the beach, and it so happened that an ER nurse from Canada was there to administer excellent CPR until our paramedics arrived with their high-flow oxygen. When they arrived he was blue but had a strong pulse.
He was brought to the ER in very critical condition but he turned the corner and he recovered completely over the next 24 hours. After a day in the hospital he and his wife and three children walked out of the hospital doors and got back into their rented car. Judging by the tests that were done when he arrived in the ER, he was a matter of seconds from being “unsalvageable.” He himself doesn’t remember several hours of all this.
The next day a visitor from California experienced a very similar event in the waters fronting the Waiohai in Po‘ipu. Again, he received excellent CPR on the beach, this time by our Po‘ipu Beach Park lifeguards, and again he arrived in the ER in very critical condition. However, he was on the wrong side of the critical few seconds, his heart and other organs had sustained too much anoxic damage (i.e., too much time without the oxygen that our breathing and our beating heart send out to our internal organs and tissues). His condition declined over the next few hours and he passed away. He left behind a wife and two children.
Then on Jan. 6 a visitor from Denmark drowned, despite heroic in-the-water efforts by nearby swimmers and beach CPR. He and his wife were here visiting family who lives here, so at least the wife has a good support system to help her. And speaking of support systems, through all this the families, and Kaua‘i, continue to be blessed by the amazing work of Gina Kaulukukui and her Beeper Team, which is now called BEST (Bridges Emergency Support Team). The team is no longer with Hospice but rather is under the auspices of Bridges, Inc. The word “bridges” was chosen for “connecting the gap between grief and healing.” I don’t wish their remarkable work on anyone. But when the work is necessary, we have the best such support team in the world.
One common denominator in these three cases is that they all occurred at non-lifeguarded beaches. This isn’t’ to say that there are guarantees for your safety if you swim at a lifeguarded beach. You may have an underlying heart condition that you don’t even know about and that comes to the fore as you’re exerting yourself in the water, maybe swimming against a current. But if it’s your day for a heart attack, your chances for survival are a lot better if it takes place at a guarded beach. There’s a much better chance that the few critical seconds will work in your favor, not only because of the lifeguards’ water expertise getting you out of the water but also because of their CPR training and their oxygen equipment and their defibrillators.
Two of the three cases occurred at very busy beaches fronting resort hotels. I think we can work on this, and one of our ocean safety goals for 2008 (as it was for 2006 and 2007) is to work with these hotels at continuing to develop programs that will increase the chances for those precious, precious few seconds. We’ll keep exploring and updating this in future columns.
In my 2007 Year-in-Review column I wrote “Maybe, just maybe, our efforts are having some impact on our ocean safety problem.” Well, caring about ocean safety certainly has it’s in-your-face moments, that much I have learned.
The other thing I said was “We can’t let down our guard.” I got that one right, and I’m thankful to be a part of our Kaua‘i-wide team that’s staying vigilant, no matter what, on this family life-and-death matter.
• Monty Downs is an emergency room doctor at Wilcox Memorial Hospital. His column appears every other Wednesday.
