POIPU — David Sandoval is happy to be alive.
The 60-year-old from Albuquerque N.M. nearly drowned last month while snorkeling at Poipu Beach.
“I look at life from a different perspective,” he said Tuesday. “The little things don’t bother me anymore. I have patience for things that used to stress me out, the normal, everyday life stress and now I have the tendency to look at the good side of people, to just accept them for how they are. I don’t question them for the things they do.”
Mike Hull was also out for a swim that day when he spotted someone snorkeling far from shore. He didn’t think much of it until after a minute or so, when the man didn’t come up for air.
“I thought, this could be a problem and at that time I was about 20 feet away, so I went underwater to see his position and that’s when I saw he was limp, vertical, the only thing out of the water was the back of his head,” said the 72-year-old from Anchorage, Alaska.
Hull didn’t think twice about what to do next.
“I put my hand up over my head, the standard signal for distress but there weren’t many people straight ahead of me. I was at the very end of the beach by the rocks and things like that and I didn’t think tourists didn’t necessarily know what that means,” Hull said.
Sandoval said his wife saw Hull’s distress signal from the beach, but she thought he was asking for assistance in rescuing a child. She wouldn’t know until they reached the shore that it was her husband who was in distress.
From where the men were, Hull said the lifeguard station was 100 yards or more away, so he knew he’d be invisible to them unless they were sweeping the area with binoculars.
“I knew I couldn’t wait for anybody on the beach, if somebody came out to me, fine, but I knew I couldn’t stay in the water. We had to leave, period, and so I just started swimming toward the beach,” he said.
Eventually, Hull made it to about 30 or 40 feet off shore, where he could stand on a rock with Sandoval and people on shore could hear him, so he started waving and shouting. After several minutes, Hull said, people on the shore could see he was holding onto someone and rushed to assist him.
When Hull saw that others were coming to help, he began swimming toward shore again and was eventually able to stand about 15-20 yards from the beach.
“By the time I got there, these guys grabbed ahold of him and started carrying him to the beach, so I just ran up after them. It had to be four or five guys,” Hull said. “One of them took his mask and snorkel off, they laid him down on his back, but the waves could still lap up on him.”
The men then grabbed Sandoval by his shoulders and his legs and brought him up to higher, more level ground, where they began administering CPR. Hull said a beachgoer came up and let them know she was a physician. Someone suggested that perhaps she should be the one administering CPR and she said no, that these men knew what they were doing.
“That helped set the tone that everything was being done, we’ve got this kind of thing. The guys who dragged him from the beach knew exactly what they were doing,” Hull said.
When the lifeguards came, they took over rescue efforts, eventually stating the man had a pulse. When the Kauai Fire Department arrived, Hull said they began working on Sandoval and Hull could see he had color back in his face.
“They never stopped working on him as far as rapid depressions. What else is going on, that stayed, like 100 count per minute and they were deep, really deep,” Hull said. “So they kept that going and these guys, the fire department guys, put him on a board and lifted him and got him up to the grassy area, all that time the compressions never stopped,”
Hull said Sandoval’s wife watched from a distance as first responders worked on her husband.
Hull said he was impressed with everything that happened that day.
“The people on the beach the lifeguards, EMT’s fire department, security. They all created this atmosphere of, it’s under control,” Hull said.
Sandoval, a pharmacy manager, doesn’t remember much about the day he was rescued, other than wanting to go snorkeling, or the five-day period following his near death experience. He is doing well, despite still experiencing some pain from three broken ribs and a dislocated sternum. He is happy to be alive.
“Now I think I’m going through more emotions about it. I’m wondering why it happened, there’s the spiritual part of it, I didn’t go, because I have something to do,” he said.
After the near drowning, Sandoval said he was placed in a medically induced coma, when he woke up, he didn’t know where he was and was surprised after learning about the accident.
“They thought that I would have brain damage because I had two brain strokes and a pulmonary embolism, but no brain damage is detected,” he said. “They put me through quite a lot of tests, but so far I’m fine, except for the memory loss.”
The experience, he said, has given him a new appreciation for life.
“I definitely appreciate everything more. I take a lot less for granted. I’ll stop and look at everyday things and take time to absorb and actually look at it. In my opinion, it’s amazing how much we take for granted,” Sandoval said.
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Bethany Freudenthal, Courts, Crime and County reporter, 652-7891 bfreudenthal@gmail.com
FRUDENTHAL, what are you doing? Now you want to write articles putting the county’s first responders in a better light? A big change from the tone you sent in the article about Miller and how first responders weren’t doing their job then!
It’s because the circumstances and outcomes are completely different. This ain’t FOX News where everything fits a common agenda! Geeeez, what’s wrong with you?