I'm going to keep this post short because I am exhausted! Today I had my second day of lifeguarding, where I learned how to rescue a distressed swimmer, which was probably one of the easiest things I learned in the course. Afterward, everyone in the class had the opportunity to take turns pairing up as lifeguards guarding part of the pool while everyone else in the group simulated a busy pool day, with one or two (or three!) people drowning the way the instructor told them secretly before getting in the water. I was the last person to go, so my instructor was really branching out while coming up with ideas. I got pushed into the pool by a "child patron" and had to continue scanning the pool while I was falling and recovering! As if that wasn't enough, as soon as I made it above water and scanned to the right of me, there were two people simulating a situation in which a child is sinking a parent, so I had to rescue them both at the same time (since the other lifeguard I was working with was saving a submerged drowning person on his side of the pool...so I'm pretty prepared for any situation.) I successfully "rescued" them and got told I did it "perfect!" which was especially awesome considering we hadn't yet discussed how to do that and the only way I knew what to do was because of last night's reading. After that, we had to swim two and a half laps, rescue a submerged victim in the deep end and then swim them all the way back to the shallow end. As if that wasn't enough, right afterward we had to swim 500 meters! In my post yesterday, I was talking about how hard swimming the 1000 meters was, well, even though this was half the distance, I was so tired from just swimming 150 meters (25 of which with a person who was totally dead-weight) that I would take swimming 1000 meters over that any day!

I got a pretty decent half hour break after that and got this from my instructor:

I feel like an official lifeguard after receiving my whistle. Anyway, after that, the class learned how to rescue someone with a rescue board (which is pretty much a surfboard), which took a LOT of effort since you have to flip it over twice while holding onto a person onto it....then comes making sure their entire body is on the board without flipping it. It was really difficult since the instructor I tested it on was simulating being non-conscious.

After that came the second hardest technique of the class...learning how to rescue a victim who may have a head, neck, or spine injury from the shallow end of the pool. After a lot of practice, I finally mastered it! Most of the time I didn't keep my feet on the bottom of the pool, but instead let them float under me, so I feel like rescuing the same kind of drowner in the deep end of the pool will be easier for me than it will be for people who utilized the bottom.

After that came an hour and a half break, which included spaghetti dinner in the unit house, then CPR certification began. Unfortunately, I had to leave half an hour into that instruction to submit a homework assignment for an online class, so I have to be to the pool by 11 tomorrow morning in order to make it up the best I can. I did stay long enough into the CPR training to get this though....

 

Of course I had to monogram it! TSM. This was a fun way of making sure everyone knows it's mine when it's outside of my lifeguard pouch without writing my actual name on it (all employees have camp names so campers don't know our real names.)

Well, that's about it for now, off to read about everything about breathing and CPR in the lifeguarding manual before I fall asleep!