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I Saved My Grandson From Drowning in a Hot Tub

And I didn’t even get a thank you

Bev Potter
The Memoirist
4 min readDec 30, 2024

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Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

I had serious doubts about the hot tub from the very beginning.

I’m not a big fan of being immersed in boiling water in general, but this particular cauldron wasn’t even in our motel room. It was a communal hot tub next to the swimming pool at a generic Quality Inn, where every Tom, Dick, and Hairy could soak his…

Well, you get the idea.

I don’t trust hot tubs because they always have that sign that says, “If you have any heart issues, for the love of God, DON’T GET IN THE HOT TUB.”

Well, what if I don’t know I have a heart issue until I get in the hot tub? What then? I’m going to have a heart attack and die in a steaming bowl of human soup.

That’s not how I want to be remembered.

We were visiting one of my husband’s daughters at her home in North Carolina, while the other one joined us from Kentucky. Both daughters were my age — awkward!— and between the two of them, they had 11 kids.

I don’t know, maybe that makes you a little lax about safety. Maybe by the sixth kid, you’re like, “Eh, there’s more where he came from.”

Everybody came over to the motel where we were staying so the kids could swim in the…

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The Memoirist
The Memoirist

Published in The Memoirist

We exclusively publish memoirs: The creative stories unpacked from the nostalgic hope chests of our lives.

Bev Potter
Bev Potter

Written by Bev Potter

Legal secretary by day, insomniac by night. Ally. BA, MA. Humor, pop culture, and things that make you think. My weekly-ish newsletter is bevpotter.substack.com

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