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Teacher grateful to be alive after nearly drowning
Cabello Elementary instructor sinks to ocean floor during scuba diving lesson
By Grace Rauh, STAFF WRITER
The last thing Kimberly Pratt said she saw was the sun shining through the blue ocean as she swam toward the surface. Then, she swallowed another gulp of salt water and lost consciousness, falling toward the sea floor.
A scuba diving instructor found her facedown on the sandy bottom of Monterey Bay, some 15 to 30 feet below the morning air, Pratt said. By her own account, she should have been dead.
But on Monday, one day after her near-drowning, Pratt laughed heartily about her brush with death from her hospital bed in Monterey. The vivacious fifth-grade teacher at Union City's Cabello Elementary School said she was thankful to be alive. She planned to return to her Hayward home today.
"I should have died," she said, sand still in her hair. "I should have died."
Pratt was working toward herscuba diving certificate and had been in the cold water about 10 minutes when she removed her mouthpiece to inflate her buoyancy vest manually. It was a routine exercise, but when she tried to reattach the device connected to her air tank, it caught on something. She motioned to her dive instructor that she was swimming toward the surface for air. She never panicked.
When she didn't surface with the rest of her group, a dive instructor from Diver Dan's, the scuba diving shop in Santa Clara that ran the lesson, went in after her, she said. She was pulled to the surface and then to the beach, where someone performed CPR on her until paramedics from the Monterey Fire Department arrived.
Pratt said she was told she was pale and had no pulse when she was pulled from the water. She came to in the ambulance on the way to Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.
"We don't know how long I was unconscious," she said. A CT scan at the hospital showed that her brain was not damaged from the oxygen loss. "You wouldn't believe this hospital
Cabello Elementary instructor sinks to ocean floor during scuba diving lesson
By Grace Rauh, STAFF WRITER
The last thing Kimberly Pratt said she saw was the sun shining through the blue ocean as she swam toward the surface. Then, she swallowed another gulp of salt water and lost consciousness, falling toward the sea floor.
A scuba diving instructor found her facedown on the sandy bottom of Monterey Bay, some 15 to 30 feet below the morning air, Pratt said. By her own account, she should have been dead.
But on Monday, one day after her near-drowning, Pratt laughed heartily about her brush with death from her hospital bed in Monterey. The vivacious fifth-grade teacher at Union City's Cabello Elementary School said she was thankful to be alive. She planned to return to her Hayward home today.
"I should have died," she said, sand still in her hair. "I should have died."
Pratt was working toward herscuba diving certificate and had been in the cold water about 10 minutes when she removed her mouthpiece to inflate her buoyancy vest manually. It was a routine exercise, but when she tried to reattach the device connected to her air tank, it caught on something. She motioned to her dive instructor that she was swimming toward the surface for air. She never panicked.
When she didn't surface with the rest of her group, a dive instructor from Diver Dan's, the scuba diving shop in Santa Clara that ran the lesson, went in after her, she said. She was pulled to the surface and then to the beach, where someone performed CPR on her until paramedics from the Monterey Fire Department arrived.
Pratt said she was told she was pale and had no pulse when she was pulled from the water. She came to in the ambulance on the way to Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.
"We don't know how long I was unconscious," she said. A CT scan at the hospital showed that her brain was not damaged from the oxygen loss. "You wouldn't believe this hospital
