Posted on 06/12/2005 8:00:59 AM PDT by SandRat
They're pulled from backyard pools and bathtubs each year, tiny limp bodies, blue and not breathing.
A young life can vanish quickly under water. A survivor can endure a lifetime of disabilities. Either way, families are torn apart by an almost always preventable tragedy.
Standard summer companions in our desert climate, swimming pools can be deadlier for children than guns. A child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming accident than in gunplay, writes Steven D. Levitt, University of Chicago economics professor and best-selling author.
Levitt analyzed child deaths from residential swimming pools and guns and found one child under 10 drowns annually for every 11,000 pools. By comparison, one child under 10 each year is killed by a gun for every 1 million guns, according to his research, outlined in a new book "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side to Everything," which he co-wrote with journalist Stephen J. Dubner.
In part because they are so familiar, swimming pools are less frightening than guns, Levitt writes.
But the danger is clear - drowning is the leading cause of accidental death for children younger than 5 in Arizona and the second-leading cause of injury-related death nationally among children younger than 15.
Water kills an average of three children each year in Tucson and, even with proper fences, swimming lessons and caution, danger lurks.
"Living with a swimming pool in your back yard is like living next to the Grand Canyon," said Dr. Bob Berg, a pediatric intensive specialist at University Medical Center and a UA professor. "You should never feel comfortable there."
"It happened in blink of an eye."
Nothing can prepare a parent to pull a limp child from the water, wondering whether a moment of inattention has led to tragic, lifelong consequences.
On a February 2004 afternoon, Matilda Gits wheeled her 18-month-old son, Michael, in a wagon to a playground near a small lake in their East Side development. As Michael sat in the shade beneath the playground structure playing with wood chips, Gits leafed through her mail.
"When I turned around to check on him, he was gone," she said. "I didn't know where he was, but I knew I didn't have a lot of time to figure it out."
Gits looked toward the street, then toward the fenced pool on the other side of the playground. She still couldn't see her son, and started running toward the lake.
"I remember running, thinking I can't run this fast, then running faster," she said.
Michael was in the lake, under water. His lips were blue, his eyes rolled back in his head. Twelve weeks pregnant, Gits dived in, grabbed Michael from the water, slammed him on the back, and yelled, "Breathe!"
Michael started crying and neighbors called 911. Michael, now 3, is just fine, but the what-ifs still plague his mother.
After the accident, Gits pushed her neighborhood to install a fence separating the playground from the lake.
"I'm not irresponsible. If this could happen to me, it could happen to anyone. It happened in the blink of an eye," she said. "For a long time, when I'd drive down the street and hear an ambulance, I'd get sick to my stomach."
Preventable devastation
About 88 percent of children who drowned were under some form of supervision, according to a survey for the National SAFE Kids Campaign.
Small distractions such as talking to somebody, reading, eating or using the phone were a factor in most of the cases. The survey found parents are overconfident in their children's safety and abilities in water and need to be more active in supervising children.
"If something terrible really does happen, that's bad enough. If a child dies or is neurologically devastated, families don't get over it," said Berg, the UMC pediatrician. "Their life has been permanently changed in a way that's hard for most of us to believe.
"When a child dies, the devastation to a family is just overwhelming. That's true for almost all child deaths, but one of the things that's dramatic about car accidents and drowning is a few minutes before that, everything is fine. A minute later, that whole dream is shattered."
Medical costs for a near-drowning victim can be nearly $200,000 a year for long-term care and a child suffering brain damage may need millions of dollars in medical care, according to the National SAFE Kids Campaign. As many as 20 percent of near-drowning victims have severe permanent neurological damage.
There is a high divorce rate among parents who have had a child drown and many parents experience long-term psychological effects, Berg said.
Lingering effects
Lynne Gonzales knows all too well about the medical and psychological costs of a near-drowning.
In 1984, Gonzales' son Tony was 17 years old and nearly out of school for the summer when some friends pushed him into the deep end of a pool.
They didn't know he couldn't swim.
By the time they jumped in to save him, the damage had been done.
For the next 13 years, Tony lingered with severe brain damage from lack of oxygen.
"In some ways that has a much worse or longer effect than drowning," Gonzales said.
After the accident, Tony spent time in three hospitals and finally was admitted to a nursing home.
The years that followed, whether he was at home or a nursing home, Tony needed care around the clock due to a tracheotomy and a gastrotomy tube. His parents fought daily with insurance companies, all the while struggling to raise Tony's three younger sisters.
Tony's family is certain he recognized them, but he never spoke again. He could communicate by blinking his eyes, but it was inconsistent.
"There were moments of joy when Tony learned to sit, to stand, to swallow," said Gonzales, who moved to SaddleBrooke last year from Milwaukee. "If you worked closely with him you could see that much of his personality was still intact."
Tony needed around-the-clock nursing care and was at home for about six years after the accident. He died suddenly at a nursing home in 1997.
"You lose a part of your own future," Gonzales said. "You miss all those things that might have been."
The pain of a drowning or near-drowning is never-ending, said Dr. Barb Smith, a member of the Arizona chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Smith has dealt with several families who have lost a child to drowning.
"Families are devastated by it in a way they're not if they have a child who dies from leukemia or some other equally tragic event," Smith said. "What makes drowning different is it's always someone's fault. It's preventable and there's so much remorse about that."
Actually the point of the article is to remind people that real everyday life is more dangerous than the off chance of your kid finding a gun. I had some friends who got into the habit of always bringing up the subject of putting in a pool. They kept asking why my husbnad and I didn't install one. Finally my husband said he wasn't interested in coming home and finding one of the neighbor's kids floating dead in the water. Besides you can only use the darn thing for 3 or months out of the year anyway.
I don't know if any pool maker has been sued but people have been sued and have lost for not having fences around their pools.
So what? I've been down this road in my arguments with the gun nazis and they don't care. Their argument is that pools (or whatever hazard you want to mention and BTW falling down stairs and loose rugs cause as many injuries as guns) have 'redeeming social values' while guns don't.
Kids are 16 times more likely to be killed by a gun if you have a gun in the house...
Kids are 16 times more likely to drown in a pool if you have a pool at your house...
Kids are 16 times more likely to be killed by a gun if you have a pool at your house...
No, wait a minute...
but, but,... what about the loop-hole in pool safety of unregulated garage sales of pools and Flea-Market sales?</sarc
Reading over Nathan Zachary's reply reminded me of something I had not thought about in decades- Dad liked to say some people were like "hothouse plants- not fit to survive in a normal environment."
Even with fences many have been sued.
Many insurance companies view pools as an attractive nuisance and charge homeowners with any sort of pool a much higher premium expecting the JohnEdwards Ambulance Chasers to sue them.
At which time I usually point out that I'm beginning to question in my mind if there is any left of the Liberals redeeming value.
Buckets are the 'logical' equivalent of Saturday Night Specials(tm), cheap and uncontrolled. Is (tap) water the 'logical' equivalent of ammunition?
That's a good description of most liberals.
Ahah!
That's the beauty of my proposal - 44,000 pool laws, not like the piddly 22,000 gun laws. They'll be no 'loopholes'1
:-)
1 - I love the misuse of that word. Anything NOT covered, aka remaining legal or unregulated, in any law becomes a loophole to said law/regulations opponents.
"Or, we have expect parents to watch their kids and not expect the TV to be a babysitter."
This is the better choice. But building a fence around pools is also a pretty good idea.
Which is why you can hardly find a pool with a deep end in it anymore...can't let people get in water over their heads, can we? On second thought, let's just remove the swimming pool that people can actually swim and get exercise in, and put in a water park with a foot-deep kiddie pool for the adults! No, wait, they can drown in that too...better ban water!
Life has a 100% fatality curve. Nobody gets out alive.
}:-)4
WHAT A COMPLETE GOOBER
I'll take the house by the grand canyon please and Dr Berg can go live in fear of his kitchen knives L0L
Thats gonna leave a mark ;)
Your post makes me feel better- don't have children yet (hopefully will have in the next couple of years) but want a pool in my backyard, hubby doesn't. Hope to get one within the next 5 years, maybe longer if we do have children just to err on the side of caution, however if my better-half sees this article it will be a nonissue in our house, there will be no pool.
And so they should. A second attractive nuisance, the bathtub, and a third, the shower are responsible for many deaths. The number 3 cause of death in the US is accidental falls.
Number 1. Car accidents.
Number 2. Heart attacks.
Number 3. Accidental falls.
Lawyers: An unattractive nuisance.
Roughly on the same order: drowndings in 5 gallon buckets and firearm accidents.
Perhaps you were being ironic about buckets, but there ws one instance where a child drowned in a bucket being used as a 'chamber pot' under the bed.
Suffice it to say, resusitation was more than difficult.
We need to close the swimming hole loop hole. ("Pool hole"?)
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