「故事·听力」I Almost Drowned And Lost My Life
I Almost Drowned And Lost My Life
This guy’s called Mick, and he wants to share the darkest experience of his life with you. This is a story about how he nearly died once, and it’s a miracle that he’s actually able to tell you his story right now. This is what happened to him.
Mick’s family lives in a pretty isolated place – their house is outside a small town, and it’s more like the countryside than an urban area. He usually goes to school by bike down a country road – it’s a very beautiful route, across the fields and woods. And there’s also a local river on the way. It’s not very deep, but it flows very quick and has lots of stones and rapids. He never went to swim there, because it’s impossible – you could break all your bones in it. But it was always nice to observe it from above when he was passing its banks on his bike. At least, it was nice until one horrible thing happened to him once when he was 14.
He was on his way home from school on his bicycle as usual. It had been raining heavily all day long, and he had to wait in the town until it passed. When the rain finally stopped Mick set off home. The country road wasn’t even covered with asphalt, and so it was pretty slippery that day. But Mick didn’t even consider that it might be dangerous – he had done it a thousand times before. He kept good control of his bike and was heading towards his house. He was riding alongside the river bank where it was quite high, and he heard the river roaring – after heavy rain it usually got much higher and quicker. He didn’t like the sound and accelerated, when suddenly things got out of control.
His wheels slipped on the road, and in order to keep his balance he had to twist the handlebars to the left. He didn’t calculate his movement properly. This was how his bike ended up slipping down the steep slope and brought him straight into the river. He wasn’t even scared – it was so unexpected that his first movements were purely automatic. The river was deep and he couldn’t reach the bottom with his feet, and neither could he hold onto the bike; it went underwater and dragged him behind. That’s when Mick made his first mistake – he let it go, and didn’t find anything better to stick to.
He was in huge, huge trouble. The initial shock quickly passed and he started swimming in order to keep his head above water. But then he made mistake number two – he was trying to swim against the current. He had heard throughout his life that if you are caught in a quick stream, you should try to swim towards the bank. But he was more or less experiencing a panic attack at this stage, and he didn’t think about that; instead he just did the first thing that occurred to him instinctively. But he couldn’t orient himself very well, as he was under the water most of the time. He shouted out, but the water gushed into his mouth, and he didn’t have much chance to breathe. That’s when he really started panicking, and panic was his third mistake, even though he couldn’t help it. His lungs already hurt; he was scared, and was about to faint because he lacked oxygen and had too much adrenaline in his blood.
And that’s when, as they say, his entire life flashed before Mick’s eyes. His family – his brother and sister, who sometimes bullied him but loved him so much, and his strict but caring parents. His adorable grandparents who never had a single angry word for him. His school, which he sometimes hated, but where he had so much fun. His dog, who would be looking for him for months if he got lost in that river. A girl who lived nearby, whom he had never had the courage to approach and tell her he liked her.
Like in the movies, he woke up in an ambulance. Mick’s whole body hurt, but he was alive! Alive! He saw his dad beside him, scared and wet. Relieved, he lost consciousness again. It turned out that when he hadn’t come home or answered his phone, his dad had gone to look for him, and saw the tracks from a bike leading into the water. He understood everything straight away, and ran along the river to look for Mick. He was nowhere to be seen and, desperate, he called 911. They managed to find him around 3 miles downstream, bending over some root and totally unconscious. He had several broken bones, was in shock and experiencing hypothermia, but things nevertheless improved rapidly – it was much worse for his dad, who was close to a heart attack that evening.
So that’s his story. Mick’s so glad that he’s able to tell it to you now. From that moment on, he started valuing his life more – he became more caring towards everyone he knew, because he realized which things really matter in life when he was about to die. And after all that he finally found the courage to approach that girl he liked, even if sometimes that kind of things seems scarier than taking a swim in a cold river.