Stuff You Should Know - How Drowning Works

Episode Date: May 10, 2018

Hundreds of thousands of people drown around the world every year, and yet it can be easily prevented and is widely misunderstood – like how you can officially drown but live to tell the tale, or how you can drown but die days later.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's over there,

so that makes this Stuff You Should Know. Hi. How are you feeling? Kind of upbeat, positive? Well, I will say that this topic, I felt like I was having a panic attack while researching and reading this stuff. Me too, like I noticed I was,

I felt like I couldn't breathe at some points. Yeah, it was, and we covered a little bit of this in Worst Ways to Die many years ago. Yeah. But boy, oh boy, drowning is no picnic. No, it's not, and one of the things that I'd always heard about drowning is that like it was actually a very peaceful experience.

I don't think that's the case. Yeah, I don't, like obviously no one can say for certain, but it doesn't seem to be, no, at all, and it seems to be like actually not a good way to go. Well, I mean, you probably could if you, and this is giving something away early, but one of the possible outcomes, aside from death, and morbidity, which is you develop an injury

or disability because of what happened is. Aren't you on record for hating that word? Morbidity? Yeah. I don't know, I don't like it. Well, my apologies, go ahead. And no morbidity, so you could ask someone who suffered drowning with no morbidity,

like was it peaceful, and they'll probably be like, nope. Well, that's where I got that from, was online if you go, and you gotta take it all with a grain of salt because there's plenty of 14-year-olds who like to just make stuff up. Sure. But there are threads on Reddit and other places that basically are supposedly people

who have survived drowning, and I didn't find any that were like, it was actually very peaceful. My brain flooded with endorphins and I was ready to go into the light. Instead, it was more like, I saw one that said burned like lava, which I mean, if you think about it, if you've ever had something go down the wrong pipe or whatever, think about how much that hurts your chest.

Well, Chuck, we're here to tell everybody that what you experienced where you took a drink of coke and it went down the wrong pipe, that didn't go anywhere near your lungs. That was the least of what can happen to you, and that was, it just hit your epiglottis, which is that flap that converts your trachea into your esophagus, right?

Yeah, that flap that's like, sometimes I wanna work and sometimes I wanna scare you to death. Right, but zero, zero coke went into your lungs when that happened. So imagine how bad that is. That was just your epiglottis. It actually gets way, way worse when you actually are drowning.

And you said something that we really need to point out here because there's, for as long as people have been drowning. Basically. Yeah, since people have been people. Right, exactly. So for as long as people have been drowning, we still have only very recently begun to make universal definitions of what drowning is.

Yeah, it's 2002, the World Congress of Drowning. That's a thing. Then they at least had the good sense to hold it in Amsterdam, at least. Right. So they could get their good time on. Sure, afterward. Yeah, after the meetings.

These are awful. But what they did there was they decided, hey, we need to really codify this because 350,000 people a year die. And it's the third most common cause of accidental death around the world. So let's like really kind of classify this stuff. So everyone's on the same page moving forward.

Yeah, because everyone wasn't on the same page. And actually, if you follow media reports, people still aren't on the same page. Oh, sure. There's a lot of unclear terminology that the medical community doesn't recognize, but that the media uses pretty frequently. There's pretty widespread misunderstanding that drowning is not death.

It's a way you can die, but it's actually a specific type of injury that starts with your epiglottis, as we'll see, or your larynx, I'm sorry. But it's like an injury that can happen to you that you can die from, but you can actually have drowned and survived. Yeah, that's very misleading

because that's the actual definition, but in everyday parlance, if you say, I went to the pool last weekend and my child drowned and someone said, oh my God, no, no, no, they're fine. Right. Like it's not a very fair thing to say to a friend. No, it's not, but if you're following the definition of the 2002 World Congress of Drowning,

that would be the right thing for you to say. Yeah, but that kind of pedantry in just everyday conversation, you should lead by saying, I had a close call. My child technically drowned according to the World Congress of Drowning. Right, and they're doing fine. Push the glasses up your nose, as you're saying.

Exactly. So I gave away a little bit here. With drowning, the whole process starts when water or liquid comes in contact with your larynx, your voice box. That something, as far as human evolution goes, something about that flips your reptilian brain out and your motor takes over.

Like your motor instincts take over and there's very little you can do from that point on as far as conscious thought and movement. Yeah, I mean, we'll get to that last part later, but you're totally right, man. Like your body is trying to do one thing and that is survive this experience. And like I said, we'll get in a little more

of what drowning looks like, but during drowning, you're right. That first contact with water and the larynx, you have that gasp initially, and then you were in charge for a short time because you tried and hold your breath voluntarily, but then your larynx just starts spasming. And hypoxemia, hypoxemia, hypo-exemia.

Hypoxemia, hypoxemia, I'll bet. Hypoxemia. No, hypoxemia. Hypoxemia, that's what it said, right? Oh my God. Hypoxemia. It's funny, I looked up a bunch of word pronunciations today,

but that one, I just flew right by it. I'll tell you when I've got down, is quinceanera. Yeah, that's next. Right. How about hypoxemia? Sure. Basically what that is is decreased levels of oxygen in your bloodstream.

So your body's trying to fight that. Right, so your larynx, whether you like it or not, your larynx has closed. You're not breathing, you're holding your breath because your larynx is trying to prevent liquid from going into your lungs, right? And so as this is going on, you're losing oxygen concentration in your lungs.

You're having a buildup of CO2. And then, and I got this from a reference to a passage from the book, The Perfect Storm. But supposedly studies have shown that after about 87 seconds your body says, okay, to hell with this, I can't spasm any longer, I'm gonna try to take a breath. Right.

If you happen to be under water, then you've just taken in water. Right. And now a whole different set of events is happening, right? So you're already starting to become sluggish, to lose consciousness a little bit from that lack of oxygen because you haven't been breathing for say the last almost minute and a half.

But now you've taken in water onto your lungs. And like I said, this changes things and it makes it way, way worse. Well, yeah. And before that even happens, your body becomes something called acidotic. Well, how would you pronounce that? Probably that way.

Yeah, I actually listened to that one. Okay, what is it? It's acidotic. Oh, it is. Yeah. It probably would have made it a long O. Yeah, no long O apparently. Okay, well thanks for going the extra mile on that one.

Yeah, I had to make up for the last one. But that's basically when, like if that happens, it can disrupt the electrical, your wiring to your heart. And you could go into cardiac arrest and that's sort of near the beginning of this process. Right, so just bookmark that everybody because all of this is happening

before your larynx stops spasming and you open up your airway and take a deep breath. And then if you happen to be under water or your mouth is just below water level, then you've just taken in a bunch of water in your lungs. Yeah, not good. So what happens when you take water into your lungs is when you look at your lungs,

if you can just peer at your lungs everyone for a second, you're gonna find that they are actually branching increasingly smaller tubes, right? Yeah, this is like elementary school science. Like everyone learned about the bronchi, the bronchioles, the alveolus, that was all kind of elementary school stuff. Right, so the point is that in the alveolus

or the alveoli, the little tiny air sacs where you exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with the capillaries that bring blood to your lungs, there's a little something called a surfactant and it's this chemical coating around your little tiny air sacs that allow them to open and close, which pumps the oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out, right?

It allows for gas exchange. Yeah, it's a very key part of the whole system of staying alive. Yeah, because if your surfactant isn't working, then that alveoli can't or alveolus can't open or close. And so you're not breathing because that's really where the rubber meets the road when you breathe.

So if the surfactant is damaged, you can't breathe. And when you take water into your lungs, it goes to the end, to those air sacs. And depending on the type of water, it messes with the surfactant one way or another. And all of a sudden now, you are not exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide, which you weren't doing very well already

for the last minute and a half, but now the water is totally screwing up that jam. Well, yeah, in the case of fresh water, and this is something I didn't know, it is different depending on salt water or fresh water. But fresh water, if you're in a swimming pool or a lake or something, it actually destroys that surfactant

and the alveoli collapse. And it just kind of destroyed. And salt water, it actually doesn't destroy the surfactant, but it washes it away, which to me is sort of like splitting hairs. Yeah. It makes the surfactant, it doesn't work anymore, no matter which way you slice it.

Right, exactly. And so there's a couple of different, two real differences between taking in fresh water and taking in salt water in your lungs, because fresh water bears a pretty strong resemblance to the water in your body and specifically in your blood. When that water enters your lungs, it actually passes very easily

from your lungs into your bloodstream. And so what happens is the dilution, the concentration of water in your blood, it becomes overrun with water to where you end up, I saw apparently one World War II study found that people's blood or animals' blood, which I hate to think of how they found this out. Oh, you know how they found that out.

But animals' blood within three minutes had an equal part of water and blood or whatever is not water in the blood within three minutes, which is way more of a dilution than we normally have. So you've gone from not breathing very well because you're holding your breath to suddenly not only are you not exchanging air, your blood is diluted within like three minutes

in a fresh water drowning. Yeah, you're really disrupting the balance of your blood and the water in your body. Everything is just thrown out of whack. And then with salt water, something else different happens too. Your, that saltiness in the water in your lungs actually draws water out of your blood

so that your blood becomes more concentrated rather than more dilute if you drown in salt water. The upshot of all of this is, you are in big trouble once water hits your lungs. Yeah, in the case of salt water, again in three minutes, and you know what's happening to the animals because they called it experimental animals.

So in other words, they drowned animals. Yeah, I was hoping to dance around that, but yeah. No, that's what they did. That's the reality. In three minutes with salt water, experimental animals lost 40% of their normal water volume in their blood. Yeah, it just thickened, which can't feel good.

The thing is, is it took, it takes like from when I saw eight minutes to die. This is actually as bad as that sounds. This is actually a less quickly fatal process than what happens to you with fresh water in your lungs. Wow. But get this Chuck, here's where drowning gets really odd.

You can die of drowning without a single drop of water ever touching your lungs. Did you know that? That sounds like a good place to take a break. Oh, are we gonna cliffhanger this? Is this a jamma jamma? I think we should hang it off the cliff. Okay, let's do it.

All right, we'll be right back. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Man, Chuck, good call, because even I'm like a little on the edge of my seat, and I know it's coming next.

And you know how this thing ends? Yeah. Yeah, well, you're exactly right. You don't have to, like, that can happen, but to drown and die, you don't need to be the TV or movie drowning where you're floating in the water. You're fully submerged. Right, you went down with the ship or something like that.

Yeah, I mean, they used to call it dry drowning, and in the media, they still call it dry drowning. It was coined in the 1970s, but those are drowning deaths in which the larynx spasmed from exposure to water, but they died from asphyxiation. No water entered the lungs. And it makes sense to call it dry drowning, but the CDC and everyone else basically said it's just

drowning. Right, it's drowning. Just because there's not water in your lungs doesn't mean you didn't drown. Right, because whether it's the water in your lungs or the fact that you haven't been breathing, you're dying from asphyxiation, and it's a water-related asphyxiation, right?

Correct. But it doesn't have to be water in your lungs. But that happens to something like 10 to 20% of people who die of drowning. They don't have any water in their lungs whatsoever. They just die before their larynx stops spasming. Yeah, and there have been some really sad cases, this one that's referenced in the article you sent.

Just last year, in 2017, a four-year-old boy in Texas was knocked over by a wave, just playing out in the ocean, like a knee deep, in water. His head did go under for a few seconds, but dad brings him out of the water, the kid recovers, he gets smacked on the butt and goes off and plays, and everything seems fine. Over the next few days, they think he has a stomach flu.

He complains of a pain in his shoulder, and the parents did not get him to the doctor fast enough, and he died in his sleep. And then doctors found a very small amount of water in his lungs. Yeah, apparently it doesn't take much, something like that most drowning victims have something like four cc's per kilogram of water

in their lungs. So if you're a kid who weighs 50 pounds, that's three ounces of water, right, to die from that, right? But the thing that scared everybody, scared the bejesus out of parents everywhere about this poor kid named Frankie Delgado, he died days after he had his drowning incident, right? No one knew that could happen.

And this is one of the ways the media is not helping things. They call this dry drowning too. That was never even called dry drowning. This one's called secondary drowning. But again, if you go to the CDC or the World Health Organization, they're like, those don't exist. Stop calling them that. It's drowning, and you can actually

die of drowning days afterward. But the thing that was really misreported about Frankie Delgado and then other kids like him is that it gives the impression that dad picked him up, spanked him on the bottom, and he went along his way, and he was totally fine that all of a sudden drops dead three days later. That's not how it works.

The kid starts, their health starts to decline. And usually, in cases where this is happening, where it's like a delayed drowning death, their health declines very obviously within two or three hours of the incident. And it's really bad. It's like they become sluggish because they're becoming hypoxic.

They throw up a lot. They vomit a lot. They might defecate themselves. They just, their behavior changes. It's very obvious that something's very wrong with them. But the problem is, is most parents don't say, oh yeah, my kid took in some water in the pool a day before. And they don't think to, they just

think like Frankie Delgado's parents did, that it's a stomach bug or something like that, when in fact they're actually dying from drowning right in front of their very eyes. Yeah, it's like the head injury that you die of a week later because of whatever, some kind of internal hemorrhaging that you don't even know is going on. Right.

Yeah, it is very much like that. Liam Neeson's wife, right? Yes, right. She died in like a ski accident, right? Yeah, Natasha Richardson. And I didn't look it up, but I know it was not that day. Oh, I didn't know that. I don't know how many days later it was.

But same kind of thing, where there's something going on in the body because of an incident that you don't realize is going on. And in this kid's case, I think his, he had edema, right? His lung tissue started swelling. Right, swelling, it could no longer, like it collapsed, the little aviolite collapse, the gas exchange wasn't going on.

And so he had a decrease in oxygen and an increase in CO2. And that's what you ultimately die from, from drowning, right? Right, but you can also get injured. Brain damage is usually the major complication if you don't die from drowning. You can have that tissue damage in your lungs. You can get pneumonia or something called

ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome. Right, and there's also usually a co, well, not usually, but it's frequently there's a co-morbidity with a drowning, which is like a head or neck injury, a spinal injury. If you dive into the shallow end of the pool and you break your neck, you're going to start drowning like immediately because of just lost consciousness and you're under water.

So as we'll see in talking about treating drowning, you want to be aware that there's a good possibility that the person's neck is not quite right. So here's one other thing that I knew before, but I had learned at one point and it really opened my eyes. Every representation of drowning I've ever seen in any movie, on every TV show, in every book, in every song about drowning, they got it wrong.

It's just wrong. It doesn't look anything like what we've all been led to believe it looks like or sounds like. Well, yeah, I mean, that is true if you are actually drowning, but what you're talking about that you usually see in the movies, if they end up getting pulled out of the water and they're fine, it's just called aquatic distress.

So when you're splashing around and yelling, you aren't drowning at that point. No, you could call it pre-drowning. Yeah, it's aquatic distress. That means you can't swim, you're panicking, and you feel like I'm in big trouble. So you're waving your arms and screaming. When you actually start drowning,

this guy named Francesco A. Pia, he's a PhD, he defined what's called the instinct of drowning response, which is nothing like you see in the movies. It's very quiet. And your body, like we mentioned earlier, your body's instinct kicks into gear and it's not trying to waive for help or yell, it's just trying to survive and get another breath

and keep that face above water. Right, it's like all hands are on deck to keep you upright in the water. That's the point. Literally all hands are on deck if the deck is the water. Right, you know? Yeah, no, it's true. That's why I said it.

So the thing is though, Chuck, with that aquatic distress thing, it doesn't always precede drowning. So much so that drowning can come on without aquatic distress. Oh yeah. And people are so conditioned to think of drowning as aquatic distress or vice versa,

that this is about the most heartbreaking thing I've ever heard. There are kids who will drown, a substantial amount of kids who drown, drown within 25 yards of a parent or whoever is supposed to be watching them. And a significant portion of those kids drown with the parent or supervising adult,

actually watching them drown and not realizing what they're seeing because it doesn't look like what they think drowning looks like. Yeah, 10%. I wouldn't overstate it. But yeah, 10% of the parents actually watch this happening.

Right, so this is what drowning looks like, right? If you're not going to... Once drowning starts, if you've gone through aquatic distress, once the drowning starts, your mouth is about at water level and you can't call out for help because there's one of two things going on.

Either you are trying to catch your breath every time your mouth comes above water and it's happening so infrequently that all you can do is work on inhaling and exhaling or your larynx is spasming and you're not breathing at all. And if you're not breathing at all, you obviously physiologically can't shout

or speak or do anything. But either way, you're not able to shout or yell or call for help or say anything. Yeah, I mean, the way I read it though is it's not like you're working on breathing. You have no choice in the matter. Yeah. Like your body has taken over

and it's not like you're like, oh, I need to get my breath. You may want to yell, but your body is saying, no, breathing is speech is secondary in this whole situation. We need to get you to breathe. Yep. And then very similarly,

your body, you can't control your arms any longer. Whatever you want to do with your arms, you can't. All you can do is kind of flap at the water. And the whole point of that is to keep your head above water as much as possible. One thing that I saw at Chuck that I don't know if you figured out, I can't figure it out, but one of the things about the instinctive

drowning response is you're not kicking. You're just using your arms. I don't get that at all. Yeah. I mean, it says no evidence of a supporting kick. I don't know about that. It just seems weird that your body would be like, oh yeah, let's get the legs in on this too.

And maybe that'll actually help keep us above water. I like that's kind of the most important part of treading water. I wonder also if it's because as you're getting a lower concentration of oxygen and you're becoming a little more sluggish, kicking your legs is actually harder than flapping your arms.

So you just can't, like your muscles won't do it. I don't know. It's weird. It could be part of that natural instinct. I would think so too. But another part of the fact that you can't control your arms is that if somebody holds a pole out right in front of your hand,

you can't say hand, grab pole. You can't grab like a lifesaver ring. Like there's, you can't do anything but flap your arms up and down and you're not doing that. Your body has taken over and this is this instinctive response that Dr. P is talking about. Yeah, and when they say you're not using your legs

that you're completely vertical in water, I don't know, that's the part that doesn't make sense to me. You can still be vertical in water and like treading water and kicking. Yeah, I don't understand it either. Yeah, maybe someone can fill us in on that one. So this whole instinctive drowning response, supposedly the most people can last

between 20 and 60 seconds of doing this. Basically bobbing and using every bit of your strength to get your mouth above water. But eventually you start to lose that battle and your mouth comes above water less and less frequently and then eventually you are submerged. And if you are, if you see somebody whose head is low in the water

and their mouth is at water level and their eyes are closed or they're just kind of blank and glassy or their hair is over their eyes, you're looking at drowning person and you want to help them. Yeah, I thought that hair over the eyes was interesting because there must be just an immediate response

when you get out of the water to wipe the hair from your eyes. Think about how annoying it is. Well, that's gotta be it. So if you see someone come out like the creature of the black lagoon, that's not a good sign. Yep, if they're gasping and they're doing this,

that's another one too. If they're trying to swim but they're not actually moving anywhere really or if they're trying to roll over on their back and they're unsuccessful, these are all signs of drowning. Yeah, I mean, I was a lifeguard for a few years and it's, I think you're,

and they tell you in class, you know, that you're used to the movies and you gotta really keep your eyes out. You can't just be flirting with the girls. Oh yeah. Waiting for someone to yell and scream because they're kicking in aquatic distress. Right.

You have to keep your eyes peeled. A good lifeguard is very vigilant. Well, I remember hearing that that like, you know, when they interview most lifeguards about, you know, somebody who drowned in their pool, they're like, they had no idea. They were there a second and then they were gone and I didn't even notice.

It didn't make a sound, you know? So yeah, you just hit the nail on the head whether you're a lifeguard or whether you're a mom or dad or a au pair or whoever, your focus has to be on the person in the pool that you're in charge of. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's.

All right, we'll come back and we'll talk about what to do and how to treat a drowning victim if you are so unlucky. Oh, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] All right. So let's say someone has drowned. Let's just say you're at a pool just to make this easy because that's kind of best case scenario because it's contained.

There is usually some sort of rescue equipment on hand. It's not like you're on the beach and you're like, I need a defibrillator. Most pools have this kind of stuff now. Plus you can also see the bottom. There's not usually like an underwater hazard or anything like that. It is about a best case scenario, yeah.

So the AHA, the American Heart Association, said that if possible, like if you're not by yourself, do the common sense thing, which is to send one person for help or to call 911 these days with phones everywhere. It's sure increased response times. But, and if you have a defibrillator, go get that thing or have your buddy do it, bring it to the victim's side, assess the situation, like are they breathing?

Do they have a pulse? And this is one of the few situations they point out where, because I know we covered CPR and the hands-only CPR is kind of what's recommended now, but that is not the case with drowning. No, apparently you still wanna do mouth-to-mouth is how I took that, right? Yeah, I think so.

Which has never made sense to me because if you're blowing into somebody's mouth, aren't you blowing carbon dioxide into their body? What's the point of that? Is it just to get the lungs opening and closing? I don't know, maybe. I've never understood that. Yeah, cause I don't think it's,

I think that's the case. Like it's not saying your body needs CO2. I think your lungs need to be expanding and contracting. Gotcha. It's been a while though since I life-guarded. Yeah, but I mean, and it used to be like, yeah, you do chest compressions in their mouth-to-mouth and then they said, no, just do chest compression.

So I was surprised to see that with drowning, they're like, do both. Right. They're back with that. And then also, don't forget, while you're doing all this, keep in mind that the person's neck might need to be supported or kept at a certain straight angle because they may have injured themselves.

That may have caused the drowning to begin with. Yeah, like if they dove in or whatever. Right. So if they're breathing, but they're not awake, then roll them over on their side because they might vomit and affixiate that way, which the way Bon Scott went out. And I believe some other rock stars have gone out that way.

John Bonham, Janice Joplin. Oh, did they all affixiate from vomit? Yeah, Irving Berlin. Really? No, I don't know. I was just trying to think of musician least likely to affixiate on his own vomit. Well, I think that's Benny Goodman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although he partied. Did he? No, I'm just being contrary. Okay. We have to lighten this thing up a little bit, right? I know, it's hard. You're looking for jokes in here, it's tough.

So let's see, you got somebody who's breathing, but unconscious, roll them on their side. Somebody who's not breathing and doesn't have a pulse, you do CPR. You want the EMS to get there as fast as possible, but CPR for, you know, whether it's a heart attack or whether it's a drowning, if you can do CPR, you can prolong the amount of time it takes

for the EMS to get there. You're just staving off like irreversible damage by doing at the very least chest compressions. Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that I did not know that I ran across Chuck is there's actually a tremendous amount of racial disparities when it comes to drowning. There are far greater numbers of African-Americans,

and this is the US strictly, African-Americans and then Native Americans and Alaskan natives who drown compared to white kids. And depending on the venue and the age group, it can actually get shocking how great the difference is. Yeah, between the age range of 11 to 12 years old, African-Americans drown in swimming pools 10 times the rate of white kids.

10 times. And this is something I did know because the pool I life guarded, where I life guarded for three years was majority African-American kids. And they, you know, we got, not special training, but we got, we were told that by the lifeguard company. Like it was a huge lifeguard company

that supplied lifeguards all over the city. Like taxis. Yeah, exactly. So at my pool and pools like that, they, you know, we had little breakout sessions for us. We were like, hey, listen, it is a systemic thing in this country where little black kids don't learn how to swim as often.

And, you know, the CDC has done studies and there's a professor in Montana named Jeff Wilts who wrote contested waters colon, a social history of swimming pools in America. And it all makes perfect sense because of discrimination and segregation. When swimming pools and recreational swimming and sport swimming started to come around,

these black families couldn't go to the pools. So they didn't take swim lessons. They didn't learn how to swim. If your grandparents didn't learn how to swim, then they're, what is it like? I think they even have a stat. You have a 13% chance to take swimming lessons and learn how to swim if your parents did not.

Only a 13% chance. Right. So it's just passed down. Yeah, and it's just odd that it coincided where a surge in popularity of pools and swimming in America coincided with two of the times when segregation was most strictly enforced in America too, the 20s and 30s and the 50s and 60s.

And so, yeah, as a result, African-Americans missed out on swimming and it's intergenerational and passed down still to this day among African-American families. Not all of them, obviously, but there are plenty out there who are like, I don't know how to swim. And I'm very much afraid that if I get you near a pool,

you're going to drown. Right. So I don't even want you taking swimming lessons because I don't want to mess with that kind of thing. And so, like you said, it becomes intergenerational. Yeah, and there are plenty of programs now, thankfully. And even when I was lifeguarding a thousand years ago, plenty of programs to try and give reduced rate

or free swimming lessons in communities like that and basically get everyone trained up. Swimming lessons help. It is one of the ways to prevent drownings is knowing how to swim. Yeah, it sounds like a no-brainer. It does. But you can drown even when you can swim,

so that's the reason they point out that one of the best ways to prevent drowning is learning how to swim. Right, it is, but they also make a very big point. If once your kid knows how to swim, you can't just be like, ah, you're fine, you go to the pool by yourself. Yeah.

Like this one article put it, like learning to swim doesn't drownproof your kid. No. Like a quarter of deaths by drowning are from kids who knew how to swim or people who knew how to swim. So it's good to know how to swim and it probably will help at some point,

like anytime you get into a pool, but it doesn't drownproof you and you need to also be smart in other ways too. Yeah, I mean, we're literally right in the middle of swim lessons for our daughter and at approaching three years old. And it's tough, man. She doesn't like getting her face in the water.

So there's a... That's just smart. Well, yeah, that's a good instinct probably. But not when you're trying to teach your kid how to swim, that's problematic. So it's a slow process in our case. Other kids take to it like a duck in the water, as they say.

Yeah, I did. I still remember taking swim lessons and I was a pretty little kid myself, but I remember the one thing I hated about swim lessons is that I had to leave in the middle of Thundar, the barbarian on Saturday morning cartoons. So I never really got to watch a single full episode of Thundar.

And the other thing I remember is realizing that as I was swimming toward the swim instructor, I wasn't getting any closer and it finally dawned on me. I was like, you're moving further away. That old trick. And she was like, no, I'm not. And suddenly I was like there, you know? But I remember being like,

oh, there's such a thing as guile and deception. I had no idea. Now I learned it thanks to my swim instructor. Yeah, my deal was I was terrified of swimming and swim class. And swim lessons. What were you terrified about? Drowning. Oh, were you okay?

Yeah, I just, my brother and sister went to swim class. They learned how to swim. I refused. I was really scared. I would not go out of the shallow end for many years. I know, I was a little scaredy cat. But my mom, I remember very distinctly when I was, I guess I was like, I was kind of old, man. I was like six years old.

And she didn't threaten me, but she said, hey, listen, you're gonna take swim lessons in like July. It's, you've got to learn how to swim. July is go time. And this was, and I'm making updates, but let's say it was July. And then in June, we went to visit my grandparents, whose neighbor had a pool.

And we were doing that thing where you hold on to the edge of the pool and get a bunch of kids and go around and around and create like a little whirlpool. And I remember very distinctly taking my hands off earlier and earlier and taught myself to swim that day. Oh, cool. And it was, cause it was kind of a current of people in front of me and behind me.

And I just started letting go a little sooner and a little sooner in the deep end. And before you know it, I was doing a very rudimentary dog paddle. And that led to very poor swimming, which I still have today. Were you swimming around and you were like self-taught? Yeah, I had a t-shirt that said self-taught back off.

Self-taught swimmer. I'm still not a good swimmer. I mean, I can swim fine, but I'm not, as far as swimming strokes and proper swimming, I'm terrible. I can do a swimming stroke. It's not any good, but I can do the technique of it. But I was on a swim team. Yeah, I never was.

It was the worst swim team in the league. And I was the worst member of the team. Yes. So, my- Worst swimmer in the county. That was your nickname. My worst was pretty much, my worst was the backstroke. And the coaches would always put me in a backstroke

and be like, please don't, like, why are you doing this? And now as a grownup, I know, because they were just like, we're losing anyway. We're gonna watch Josh do the backstroke. Every time I did the backstroke, I would end up like two lanes over. I was just about to say, I bit you into a different lane.

Yeah, and when I bumped into the other kid, they wouldn't inevitably stand up. And so we'd both be disqualified because I couldn't stay in my own lane. And then the coaches just thought that was hilarious. Yeah, I was never on a swim team. And that's where you learn how to do it properly, you know? I mean, I can, I can ape those strokes

from watching the Olympics, but it's, it's nothing close to, I mean, I can't do butterfly obviously. I'll teach you this summer. Okay. Butterfly is definitely the hardest. Man. But the breaststroke, it's nice.

It's a good, it's a good stroke. I'm gonna, I'm teaching you to swim this summer. Some strokes, okay? Yeah, I mean, I can do a rudimentary breaststroke, but it looks more like I'm just kind of bobbing up and down. I'm not really not going very far. Yeah, but once you, once you, if you do it, you're like,

oh, this is what it's supposed to feel like. I know what you're talking about. I've had that sensation before too, but you're just like a, like a frog that ain't quite right, you know? All right, so here's some other handy rules. If you have a newborn or a toddler, any, but anyone basically up to about four,

they say to, they call it touch supervision. So like, never be more than an arm link away, because it can happen very fast in a swimming pool and a bathtub. Get off your cell phone, put down your Marie Claire in your red book and your readers digest. Or your men's health. Sure.

Or your bodybuilders weekly. Right. Or your mad magazine. Yeah. Pay attention to your kid. If you have a pool, you need to have that thing fenced in. Oh yeah. Or even better these days, they have those excellent,

that's not a hard top, but it's between hard and the little soft top that are retractable. So you get out and you go inside and you can, you can cover that pool right up. Yeah. Although I think by law, you have to have a fence around like four-sided fence with like a self-closing gate that also self latches too.

Yeah. And you have to grease it with Crisco so little kids can't climb it. Well, you do that anyway. Right. But it is, it's fun to watch them try. You should learn CPR. You should have all the little lifesaving implements

at your pool. Oh, another one. I had not thought about this, but if you have a pool, you want to have a landline too, because you need to keep a phone that works right by your pool at all times. Yeah. So you need to be like thirst and howl

and have a pool that... Made out of a clam shell. That a guy in a white tuxedo can bring over and sit down on a side table. Right. Or like Hunter Thompson at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Well, I need to bring up Hunter Thompson at some point in this episode.

One other thing I want to say too, also if your kid has like an episode that looks like a close call to you, but they seem fine, then yes, keep an eye on them for the idea that they could conceivably have drowned and they could be developing symptoms. And if they start to develop any symptoms, then take them to the ER.

And the ER doctors will very kindly listen to their lungs to see if they hear any water. Easy peasy, right? At the same time, don't freak out. Like if your kid just coughs and sputters a little bit and they're fine and they don't develop any symptoms at all, they're fine, most likely, right? But it does pay to be vigilant

and it is better safe than sorry. Just don't be terrified if your kid, as long as they didn't have anything that you could be like, that was kind of a drowning episode that just happened. You're probably in the clear. Yeah, it's a rare case that kid in Texas, but because it does happen, keep an eye out for sure. On the other hand, though, the media,

like talking about this stuff supposedly has saved at least one other kid's life from the publicity that went on that case that happened to another kid later on and the parents had heard about this and took their kid into the ER and saved her life, I believe. There you have it.

You also don't necessarily just drown in a pool either. No, I mean, this stuff is horrifying. The thought of an infant drowning in a dog water bowl is a nightmare scenario. Yeah, a dog water bowl, an open cooler that has melted ice, toilets, a cleaning bucket, anything that can hold something like one inch of water

is enough to drown an infant and possibly a toddler, I think, too. Absolutely. Cars, people drown in cars as well. Yeah. Bath tubs are actually another one. So get this, man. So usually, people who drown in bath tubs are infants or the elderly, but there's a lot of adults who drown in bath tubs

and specifically hot tubs. Did you know about this? Well, I mean, yeah, you get a little drunk, you stand up too fast and you're dizzy from the temperature. It's not a good combo. No, and that's supposedly what happened to Orville Rebenbacher. He was in a hot bath and suffered a heart attack and ended up drowning.

Whitney Houston died in a bathtub. And I think every year in the US, about 330 people drown in their bathtub in a year. Seems like a normal amount, right? Yeah. Guess how many die in bath tubs in Japan in a year? How many? 14,000.

Why? I don't know. I think they take more hot baths. They have those soaker tubs too. Yeah, it's like part of the culture. That's the only thing I can think of because they also have like one third of the population of the US too.

That's a lot of drowning deaths in bath tubs, man. Man. Yeah. Well, they did say too, like more people die in Florida in car drownings just because there are more waterfront roadways. And then earlier when we talked about the racial aspect, the whole deal, we kind of just kind of flew past it.

But native Alaskans and indigenous peoples died more than white people because they are more often in bodies of water that are probably far away and have logs and rocks and things underneath the surface. Yeah. So they have more exposure to natural bodies of water. Than the average American.

Yeah. You got anything else? Nope. Well, that's drowning. Hopefully we helped in some way because summer's coming. Okay? That's right.

And I'm gonna teach you the breaststroke. Sweet. If you wanna know more about drowning, you can type that sad sad word into the search bar at how stuff works and it'll bring up something. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this first thing

I just pulled up on my phone right here. Look at that. Nice. But it's about the Steve Miller band in Peaches. Remember in the emojis episode, one of us, probably you. I didn't say Steve Miller. I said all my brothers. Oh.

Well, he said someone mentioned the line from Steve Miller band. I really like your peaches. I wanna shake your tree. Did one of us not mention that? No, this person is out of their mind. Well, he has an email regardless. And we all love the Steve Miller band.

Now this story is probably not true, but I want you to believe it. Back in college when my youngest daughter was born, I was driving a delivery truck for a small auto parts company. I worked with this old guy and he was probably like 42. And his stories, I worked with this old guy. He's probably like 42.

That's me talking. Okay. So one time he told me that he worked in this auto shop years ago and it was owned by this husband and wife. And he had played bass for a little while in the Steve Miller band. And her name was Peaches, his wife. So the story was that the line from Steve Miller,

really like your peaches wanna shake your tree, was Steve Miller taunting his own bass player. Mean. He says, I don't know if this is true, but the story is like it rang true enough. So I like to think that somewhere there's a couple that owns an auto parts store in Arizona. And to stick it to Steve Miller.

Who doesn't wanna stick it to Steve Miller, you know? And that's from Jared. Dude, I was in the local market near my house about a year ago. Buying some Artisan Tonic. My, no. And my buddy Chris Cox, who you know, who plays bass in my band,

we were, he happened to be in there where we were kind of talking about music. His wife's name was Peaches too. No, it's not. We were talking about music and this guy who looked like an old Southern rocker came up and he was like, you guys in a band? We went, yeah.

And he was like, me too. It's like, oh yeah? And he went, I'm the flute player in the Marshall Tucker band. No. And I was like, whoa. Wow. Like if Marshall Tucker band is known for one thing, it's the flute.

Like for real. What's the, name off a couple of their fluity songs. Well, Hurt It and Love Song, Can't Be Wrong. That one has that famous flute part. What? No, no. You know that song. Sure, but I can't think of the flute part.

Oh, I mean, it's the whole intro. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Do-do-do-do-do. That's all flute. Oh, I guess I never realized that. Anyway, a bunch of their songs have the flute and he is, granted, he was not the original floutist. He's one of these, you know,

Marshall Tucker band's one of those deals where it's like two original members. They've had 20 flute players. Like the Temptations or something. Yeah, but I was still impressed. Man, that's amazing. That is impressive. And then like Anchorman,

he whipped one out of his sleeve right there in the store. Kicked some candles off the tables and went to town. Yeah, I'd say Marshall Tucker band is second only to Jethro Tull for flute innovation. Okay, that's who I'm thinking of. They did like aqua lung. Hey. Hey, how about that? We just came full circle.

All right, let's just end it. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and me and Jerry, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Clark and at SYSK Podcast and Chuck is at Movie Crush. Chuck's on Facebook at facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant and at slash stuff you should know.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.