LISTEN: A Woman Describes What It’s Like To Nearly Drown – And The Story Of Her Survival
When Carol Fernandez went tubing with her friends on the Salt River in Arizona 30 years ago, she was expecting an idyllic day of aquatic activities. And for the first hour that is precisely what she got – that is until, unexpectedly, her tube flipped over, the rope tethering her friends’ tubes to her own pinning her underwater.
Fernandez, 21-years-old at the time, had a full life ahead of her – she was young, engaged, and madly in love – but in an instant she risked losing it all. The adrenaline coursing through her veins, she viciously fought to get to the surface of the shallow water. Luckily, her struggle was loud enough to catch the attention of a man floating nearby.
“There just happened to be this guy who had gotten stuck under the bridge,” Fernandez recalled of the situation. “He lifted my head up so that I could breathe, but he thought my neck was going to break so he let go.” Fernandez says she held her breath for as long as she could, but soon had no choice but to breathe in water.
LISTEN: CAROL FERNANDEZ DESCRIBES WHAT IT’S LIKE TO NEARLY DROWN
And that was the last thing she remembers before waking up on the banks of the river surrounded by a large onlooking crowd. One man was leaning directly over her – the man who had revived her. And beside him, stood the man who tried to free her on the river.
The two were friends, and both played a critical role in saving Fernandez’s life, and despite telling them “thank you” repeatedly, she wishes she could say more.
“You don’t know at the time the impact that it’s going to have. You know, [to say] this is going to affect me every day for the rest of my life – you really can’t tell that to somebody. But it would be really great to tell them that now.”
Without the quick action of those two men, she says, she might not have survived – and she couldn’t be more grateful.
“I think about you guys – whoever you are – what you did has stayed with me every single day. I hope that somehow they know that.”
After her near-death experience Carol went on to become a mother, a wife, and a lawyer, and now lives with her family in Newton, Mass..
