Last week a four-year-old boy in Houston passed away from “dry drowning” days after he went on a swimming trip. Days after the incident a father in Colorado said he was able to save the life of his two year old son after he saw the story and noticed his son was having similar symptoms.
Sun ‘n Fun lifeguard in Lubbock, Kristen Blase said she has been watching children in the pool for three years and she notices different ways that kids can accidentally ingest too much water.
“I’ll see kids jump in the water and they start to panic, they do that bobbing motion where they come up and down trying to breathe,” said Blase. “So when they are coming up they are sucking in that water so that gets down into their lungs, and then they become passive, face first in the water.”
Father Ricardo Marquez said after hearing about the dry drowning, he began to look up symptoms and now keeps an even closer eye on his young children while they are swimming.
“It became very scary for us because we have three children so we started to do some research, and now we know that the chances of that happening are very slim to none but it’s always good to know the signs and symptoms,” Marquez said.
Dr. Jonathan Skelton at Star ER said symptoms can take hours but sometimes they can take days before they show. It’s important to notice if your child is coughing, seems exhausted or weak, complains of body aches or head pain.
“They’ll continue to cough quite a bit, they’ll have a higher heart rate, their respriatory rate will be increased, they’ll be breathing much faster than normal,” Skelton said.
If parents do see any unusual symptoms after a swim they are encouraged to immediately take their child to a doctor and have their lungs looked at.