Had one of those moments today. It's gonna take some explaining, so let me go into a couple of pertinent facts.
I swim for a swimming club (think I've mentioned that before), and we train at one of the pools in Bristol. The club- or at least the older section- has become a bit of a second family, and though loads of other people use the pool every week, we consider it to be 'ours'.
Therefore, the lifeguards- poor people who have to put up with us!- have also become fairly involved with the club to varying degrees; we know most of their names, say hi etc.
At the moment, we're off training for the summer. Yesterday, however, a group of us decided to go swimming, partly just to annoy the centre staff who thought they'd got rid of us for the summer! It was good, and we all enjoyed ourselves.
I was extremely surprised this afternoon to pick up the Evening Post to see that the headline story was that a man had suffered a cardiac arrest yesterday, whilst swimming at our 'home pool', and had been saved by the lifeguards before being taken to hospital. He's currently in intensive care.
The headline made my heart flip for two reasons- a) we'd been at the pool just six hours later, and, as the pool had been closed for four hours, we were there two hours after it had opened and b) it's almost definite that we know the lifeguards who saved his life. Very heart-flipping on both counts!!
To finish, thoughts are with the man and his family, I hope he pulls through :( Also, I'm proud of 'our' lifeguards, for saving the man's life, at least for now <3