HE PAID THE PRICE AFTER SAVING HIS FRIEND’S LIFE
Joel Szota, Brewer Park, Oct. 3, 2017.
“I saved someone’s life once. I was around 13 or 14 and we were at a family friend’s cottage at Port Elgin — my parents’ best friends from high school.
“When our parents weren’t looking, we’d always go for a walk and jump off the pier. Every year they told us not to, but all the kids did it. And this one time it was me and my sister and my friend who was two years older than me. We jumped off the pier and went for a workout swim — I was into that kind of thing then.
“So my sister was the strongest swimmer, and she was like 30 metres ahead of me.
“I’m in the middle and my buddy, who probably wasn’t quite as strong, was about 20 metres behind me. In between breaths I think I hear yelling, but I’m trying to push myself, so I’m not really paying attention. So it takes four or five strokes, only coming up for breath every two, before I realize that somebody is actually yelling behind me. And I turn around and my buddy is bobbing in and out of the water, and his face is in total distress.
“I could tell it was something serious. He’s still conscious and yelling ‘Help!’ but his screams are getting drowned out because he’s going under the water and he’s losing strength.
“So I screamed for my sister, who’s a more experienced swimmer than me, but she’s too far ahead, so I swam back to him. I had played a little water polo and I’d had a little training, so I knew where I was supposed to grab him and hold him up from the water, and I got him back to the shore.
“It turned out, he got bit on the foot by a fish and panic and shock set in. Then during one scream of surprise, he took some water in and started freaking out and overreacting, to the point of shock. And then all of a sudden he forgets how to swim, swallows more water, starts choking, that sort of thing.
“Fortunately it turned out really well. I just hauled him up from behind and got him back to shore. He coughed up some water and was rattled, but he was totally safe.
“But in all of this, some people from the pier had seen this and they called an ambulance, so by the time we were on shore, the police were there and all our parents were down there.
“My only priority was that he was safe, and once we established that, the police wanted to talk to us and mom and my uncle were all ticked off.
“Here I am thinking that maybe, not to glorify it, but maybe I’ll get a little hero action, but they’re angry because we weren’t supposed to be jumping off the pier in the first place.
“And it lasted for days. This did not blow over quickly.
“So I try to hang it over his head a little bit, but for everyone, else it’s a dark moment that we don’t talk about in front of the parents.”