Did I Scar Him For Life?

Today was Declan's last swimming lesson for this session. To celebrate, the last 10 minutes of our lesson we got to play in the water!  We were able to take our little ones down the water slide or in the lazy river. Since normally one has to be 48" tall I figured Declan should do the water slide. I love water slides and figured Dec would like it too. We climbed up two stories to the water slide. It's a tube that goes outside the building and snakes around. I knew I needed to stay sitting up so we wouldn't go to fast, but that proved harder than I thought. As soon as we sat down in the rushing water, Declan was frightened. He started crying and trying to crawl out of my arms. This caused me to be thrown flat on my back, flying down the dark slide with a baby clawing my arms and chest trying to get free. I thought I was going to drop him and he'd go flying down the slide without me. I managed to keep a hold of him but at the end of the slide we came shooting out and were both dunked under water. As our heads came up he cried and cried and clung to me terrified. I felt awful that I had scared him so badly and had let something that was supposed to be fun become scary. We stayed in the water and went to the lazy river where he calmed down but still wanted to be hugged and held. We won't be going on any water slides any time soon! Hopefully he won't be a young man wondering why he's terrified of water slides some day!