Vancouver man's near-drowning highlights the need for CPR training
Credit to Author: Denise Ryan| Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2020 23:14:53 +0000
Saurabh Kalra knew he was in trouble the moment the tile bottom of the pool dropped off. Water rushed in through his mouth and nose. He was drowning.
“It all happened within seconds,” said Kalra, a consultant at Ernst and Young who was submerged in the pool of his Vancouver apartment complex last November for six minutes before being rescued by three strangers.
A recent immigrant from Delhi, Kalra said: “I grew up in a landlocked area. Our pools were shallow. I had taken basic swimming before coming, Level 1, but I had no expectation the pool would be that deep or have that incline.”
Now he hopes by sharing his story he can help others avoid the danger that nearly killed him.
“Here we are surrounded by lakes and oceans and pools in our apartment buildings, and many immigrants coming to Canada are not familiar with the dangers and are not strong swimmers,” he said.
According to Canada’s Lifesaving Society, newcomers to Canada and children under age five are at the highest risk of drowning.
Kalra’s daughters, Mysha, 7, and Myra, 4, were in the changing room after a family swim in the shallow end of their Langara Gardens apartment complex pool. Alone in the water, he decided to walk from one end of the pool to the other. The pool had no buoy marking the deep end, and, according to Flávia Mandic, one of the women who rescued him, the depth markings were inaccurate.
The last thing Kalra remembers after the bottom dropped off and before he blacked out was the sight of a woman through a window inside the gym that bordered the pool deck.
“I raised my arm and waved,” he said.
Inside the gym, Mandic, a registered nurse and program manager for B.C. Children’s Hospital, was working out with friends Juliana Santana Silva and Flavia Donato Nascimento.
“The lady on the treadmill said there was a man in the pool who went under and didn’t come up,” said Mandic.
Mandic, Nascimento and Silva had been working out with their backs to the pool, and didn’t understand immediately what was happening.
“She yelled again, ‘I’m not kidding!’ ” said Mandic.
Saurabh Kalra, sitting, with his rescuers, from left, Juliana Santana Silva, Flavia Donato Nascimento and Flavia Mandic pool-side at Langara Gardens in Vancouver on Jan. 21.
The connecting door to the pool was locked, so Silva had to run outside to get to the pool and open the door for the others.
Mandic rushed to the pool’s edge and stared at the water: “I couldn’t see anything at first because there are black tiles on the bottom of the pool. Then I saw his body lying on the bottom, facedown.” She kicked off her shoes and jumped in. Soon all three women were in the deep end, desperately diving and trying to pull Kalra’s inert body up.
“My friend Flavia tried to grab his arm to lift him but he kept slipping away,” said Mandic.
Finally one of the women got a foot underneath him and was able to push him up from the bottom so they could pull him to the surface. People gathered on the pool deck and one woman called 911 but no one helped them get Kalra out of the water, said Mandic.
“Finally we were able to get his head up on the edge of the pool,” said Mandic. “His lips were blue and he wasn’t breathing.”
They dragged him onto the pool deck.
Mandic was dimly aware of someone crying hysterically in the background, and someone else saying, “He’s dead!” But her adrenalin was pumping and her CPR training kicked in.
“I knew my CPR training was five years out of date, but I remembered that they say it’s better to do something rather than nothing, so I started the compressions and rescue breathing. After a while he gasped, and I knew that was a sign of life,” Mandic said.
By the time the ambulance arrived Kalra had a faint-but-slow pulse. As paramedics worked to save him, his two daughters came wandering out of the change room. Mandic said the building manager placed the girls alone in the elevator and sent them up to their apartment.
When Kalra’s wife Shilpa asked where their father was, the confused girls explained that he was downstairs with the police. “My children saw paramedic uniforms and thought they were police. They told my wife I’d been arrested,” said Kalra. “Even the paramedics didn’t have time to tell my wife what happened.”
Once Saurabh Kalra got to the hospital, doctors contacted the building manager to review security tapes to see how long Kalra had been underwater. The answer stunned them. “He had been underwater for six minutes,” said Mandic.
Experts believe brain damage occurs after around five minutes of oxygen deprivation.
“It’s a miracle I survived,” said Kalra, whose MRI days later showed no brain or organ damage. “Those ladies were strangers, but they were my angels.”
Kalra hopes sharing his story will help bring changes: more signs at private pools like the one in his condo complex; more information for newcomers to Canada who may not be safe in the water; and he also hopes to bring awareness to the importance of CPR training.
To learn more about CPR or sign up for classes, visit:
https://www.sja.ca/English/Courses-and-Training/Pages/Course%20Descriptions/CPR-AED-Courses.aspx