I lay bathed in bright white lights and waited. Nothing seemed to be happening. What was going on? I wondered. Why aren’t they taking me to a recompression chamber immediately? Alarm came over me. Maybe they don’t know how urgent it is for me to get into a recompression chamber.
I opened my mouth and croaked out something I couldn’t hear. How could I manage to explain to them that I had to have the excess nitrogen bubbles in my system reduced so that my body could breathe them out gradually? They had to know that only recompression could help me. Then, suddenly, terror swept over me. What if the chamber was already in use? God, how long could I hold out? I’m not ready to die! I started talking in what I hoped was a loud voice, while I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling. Squeezing the words from my faltering brain, I gasped out my name and address and then said, “I’ve been injured in a diving accident! I’m suffering from severe decompression sickness! I need to get into a recompression chamber right away!”
A miracle happened. A nurse came over with a clipboard, writing down what I said. She peered at me, and her lips moved, but I still heard nothing. I told her I was deaf from my accident. She looked surprised and mouthed the words “You can’t hear me?” I told her I could not hear a thing. She wrote the question down and gave it to me. Luckily, the oxygen I had been breathing on the Seeker and during the chopper ride had helped my vision, and I could read her writing, although the words kept moving off the page, as if I were looking at a television screen with an improper horizontal alignment. “Are you deaf?” she had written. I nodded. Someone brought over a tuning fork and the nurse put it in my face. Can you hear this? I shook my head no. Put me in a recompression chamber now! I tried to say, but I might as well have been trying to commandeer a nightmare.
After I signed the forms to release both the hospital and the attending medical personnel from legal liability, the nurse found a vein, and I was hooked to an intravenous unit which provided saline to combat dehydration, combined with adrenaline and a liquid sugar to give me more energy. But they could not both stop the pain and save me. I couldn’t be given painkillers because the personnel treating me needed to know if the pain was being resolved by my treatment, or where in my body the pain, numbness, or paralysis continued after the recompression. I looked at the needle in my arm that fed me liquid from the intravenous unit and wondered—was I getting better already? What had given me an adrenaline surge, helped me to focus on getting treatment I desperately needed, and rushed blood through the collapsed vein that the Coast Guard man had not been able to apply the syringe to? Maybe it was the fear of death.
I was wheeled to the recompression chamber, a large, enclosed metal tube that looked about the size of a large van. There was a row of seats for several people, since this system had been built to allow recompression treatments not only for divers but for multiple victims of burns or puncture wounds. Increased oxygen pressure was found to be beneficial in both of these cases, and hospitals with recompression chambers were sometimes able to schedule patients for simultaneous treatments, which made the most efficient use of the chamber, which cost a medical facility over a million dollars to install and maintain.
Now the only ones in the chamber were myself and the male nurse attending to me. We would both be subjected to the same amount of additional pressure, as the doctor outside the chamber controlled the treatment. Because the U.S. Navy Recompression Table 6-A recommended a five-and-a-half-hour treatment, both the nurse and I would be subjected to a depth-pressure of 165 feet, and the nurse risked getting bent from the long, deep exposure. Although this was rare, it had happened before. In spite of the risk, at least one medical person was required to attend to me, provide drinking fluids, keep me comfortable, and monitor my progress. Also, if I had problems equalizing the pressure on my ears, the nurse would have to puncture my eardrum. An instrument designed for this purpose lay menacingly on a table within easy reach.
Now that I was in the chamber, I felt renewed hope that I would be well again, as I had first thought when I made the decision to ascend even though I knew I would get bent. Yet although I had known other divers who had gone through recompression treatment, I did not know exactly what to expect. Whenever anyone spoke about the treatment, it was usually brief. Cave divers like Marc Eyring, at Ginnie Springs, in Florida, would refer to their treatment as being put in “the pot,” and they would shrug it off as something that just had to be dealt with on occasion, an occupational hazard like frostbite for mountain climbers. For a commercial diver like Glenn Butler, the recompression chamber was simply another tool that he routinely used after his deep excursions, so that he could complete his lengthy 20- and 10-foot decompression stops in the comfort of warm air instead of cold water. Divers like Gary Gentile and John Moyer had simply told me that yes, they had gotten bent, been treated, and were fine now. All of these divers exhibited a nonchalance about their recompression treatment that made me believe the worst was over. I was wrong to believe that. A new and more psychic pain was about to begin.
As the doctor outside the chamber started the treatment, I felt the surrounding pressure increase on my ears, just as when I was diving. I relieved the pressure on my ears, just as I did when diving. The air got very hot and uncomfortable as the compressed air rushed into the chamber, and I felt as if I were in a rapidly heating oven. I started to sweat. Although I was uncomfortable from the sudden rise in air temperature, my pain eased as I was put under increased pressure and the nitrogen bubbles that were attacking my body were reduced in size. Some of the excess nitrogen was forced back into my tissues.
There was nothing much to do but lie there and wait. The nurse looked at me and occasionally checked my vital signs. When he was persuaded that I was in stable condition, he read a Stephen King novel to pass the time.
The compressed air in the chamber cooled, and now I felt as if I were in a refrigerator. I signaled the nurse for a blanket. As the pressure was gradually eased and I was brought closer to surface pressure, the nurse put an oral-nasal mask over my face so that I could breathe pure oxygen. I knew this meant that we were at 60 feet depth-pressure. The pure oxygen helped flush out the excess nitrogen faster and also forced oxygen into tissues that had been cut off from blood because of the nitrogen bubbles blocking the way. Some of my tissues did get oxygen even while I lay on the Seeker and in the chopper, but my blood flow was severely restricted by the sheer number and size of the nitrogen bubbles. The bubbles also compromised my blood’s ability to carry oxygen. Dr. Bill Hamilton, among others, has contributed to research showing that the nitrogen bubbles are treated as invaders by the body’s immune system, which mounts a complex and not fully understood systemic defense. Part of the immune defense involves the creation of nitrogen-specific and helium-specific antigens—antigens are the marker cells that attach themselves to invading viruses and bacteria, targeting the invading cells for destruction. Even after a person recovers from the bends, specific inert-gas antigens lurk vigilant in the body against a future bubble attack.
The attending nurse monitored me closely for signs of oxygen toxicity. If I showed symptoms of seizure, he would immediately take the oral-nasal mask off my face and the seizures would stop as I breathed the surrounding air. In the recompression chamber, the greatest danger was not dying from a seizure, as it was when I breathed pure oxygen underwater, but having a seizure and biting off my tongue. To help prevent the onset of a seizure as I breathed oxygen at 60 feet, the nurse put down the horror novel at twenty-minute intervals and took the oral-nasal mask off my face for air breaks. My luck held out, and I did not have a seizure.
It now dawned on me exactly how lucky I was: I had risked everything in my obsession for artifacts, and I had come close to dying. I had been so comfortable in the water that I did not allow myself to think anything like this could really happen to me. But as I looked around, I knew that it was all too real. I did not know if I would recover completely. I still hoped for the best, but now I finally admitted to myself just ho
w close I had come to going over the edge. Even though I had pushed myself too far, I was still alive. But now nagging questions flooded my mind like oxygen: How did I let things get so uncontrolled that I wound up struggling for my life? What motivated me to take the extreme risks that led to my predicament?
Suddenly, I heard ringing in my ears. Then other noises. My hearing was returning! I told the nurse the good news and he relayed the information to the doctor outside the chamber. A short while later, the doctor stood beside my gurney, inside the chamber. Even though we were now pressurized at 30 feet, the doctor could enter through a lock-in, lock-out chamber, essentially a separate compartment attached to the main unit. The doctor could walk into the chamber from surface pressure, seal it, then increase the pressure until it matched the main chamber’s pressure. When the pressure in the two chambers was equal, the doctor could open the hatch connecting the units and walk over to me.
“Can you hear me?” the doctor asked, incredulous.
“Yes,” I replied. “But everything sounds funny, and my ears are ringing.”
The doctor’s face showed shock. “You’re lucky you can hear at all.” He shook his head. With a tone indicating disbelief, he said, “You’re going to walk away from this.” It was as if he expected me to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life and felt betrayed. He quickly added, “But your diving career is over.”
With those words I felt robbed of breath. Even though I was getting better, and was happy I could hear again, I wanted to close my ears. I could no longer dive! The news was a gut punch. The doctor informed me that he would extend the treatment at 30 feet to see if the extra time under pressure would help my hearing come back more fully. The thought of an extra thirty minutes in the chamber bummed me out. Thanks to the nitrogen and then oxygen pummeling me from the inside out, my body now felt worse and more battered than during my college days when I sometimes played two games of rugby in a row.
Could I just sleep? No, I would not be allowed to shut my eyes because sleep would slow down my breathing and circulation, reducing the rate at which the excess nitrogen was eliminated from my body. I wearily resigned myself to staying awake and to the extra time in the chamber. I hoped it would make a difference but I also knew that even the doctor could not know for certain if the extended time would help. Because it could not hurt me, the extra time was worth the investment and, in the larger scheme of medical care, even the added risk of the bends to the nurse treating me.
When the treatment was over and I was wheeled to my hospital room, I was both mentally and physically exhausted from my ordeal. It was nighttime and the hospital was quiet, the hallways bathed in dim electric lighting. It seemed I had survived.
During the six hours I was undergoing my recompression chamber treatment, the Rouses were diving in Dutch Springs, helping with checkouts. They had dived the previous day from the Dina Dee—the boat co-owned by the Rouses’ advanced-diving instructor, Bob Burns—on the wreck of a massive freighter, the Ayuruoca, off New Jersey, thirty-five miles north of the Northern Pacific, in a deep area known as the Mud Hole. Chris and Sue dived together to 170 feet and into the wreck, where Chris recovered two small bottles from the massive vessel, which sank in a collision in 1945, just after World War II.
The Rouses made post-ocean, freshwater quarry dives the way to rinse their gear of salt water, which was corrosive to the diving equipment. When the Rouses arrived home in the early evening from the quarry, they got a call about my accident from Steve Berman in Florida—the news had traveled quickly through the diving community—telling them that I was very badly bent and it was not certain that I would live.
All Berman knew at the time was that I had surfaced too soon and missed about two hours of decompression. Both he and the Rouses had a lot of questions about what exactly had happened to cause such an uncontrolled event. Maybe I had several equipment problems, one after the other? Maybe I had gotten trapped inside the wreck and used up my air trying to get out? But they also knew that whatever had happened to me could happen to them. Hearing my account of the accident would provide them with another bit of knowledge that might prove useful in keeping them alive underwater. Steve Berman, the Rouses, and I had all been trained by Marc Eyring—the former Green Beret who taught cave diving at Ginnie Springs—and we subscribed to his philosophy of the sport that when we stopped learning we would become complacent, and die.
The Rouses knew, of course, that there were grave risks associated with diving—that significant threats lurked in any sports adventure. Less than two years earlier, the Rouses became painfully aware of the very real, deadly risks that they and their friends undertook in the world of sport flying when Chris’s first flight instructor, Pete Miller, died in the air. Chris and Chrissy had heard about Miller’s death after a day of diving, much as they found out about my accident. That night in July 1989, when Chris turned on the television he heard about a midair collision between two private airplanes just a few towns away, at Quakertown Airport, where Chris had learned to fly. Although the names of the seven victims had not yet been released, Chris Rouse’s heart sank. With a few phone calls Chris and Chrissy unearthed the tragic details. During an air show, Pete Miller—he had lent his plane to Chris and Sue Rouse for their first trip to Florida, with the words “A crash is as good as a sale!”—had flown a group of skydivers to their jump zone. After all of the parachutists had leaped out of the plane, Pete headed back to the airstrip. During his final landing approach, Pete collided with another private plane that carried six people. Both planes tumbled twelve hundred feet out of the sky and those who hadn’t died in the air were killed on the tarmac. Chris was rocked by that news: It was the first time he had lost such a close friend.
The red-haired Pete Miller was a large-framed man, missing several teeth, whose lips seemed permanently attached to a stale, pungent cigar stub. With his raunchy sense of humor, the Vietnam War veteran was a throwback to the barnstormers of the 1920s, pilots who performed aerial acrobatics and dazzled crowds with displays of what they could do with that new phenomenon, the airplane.
Chris understood that if a man like Pete Miller, who had survived the Vietnam War, could die doing something he was so proficient at, then so could anyone else, and so could Chris and his family die diving. The realization tempered Chris’s actions, making him more cautious. But Chrissy was too young to see things the way his father did. Chrissy had not developed the kind of close friendship with Pete Miller that his father had. Chrissy saw Miller’s death as tragic, but he was able to shrug it off—sometimes your luck runs out.
The news of my accident brought to Chris’s mind Pete Miller’s tragedy, reminding him that both in the air and underwater, people who were proficient at their sport could make mistakes and die.
Chrissy’s driving record reflected just how little Pete Miller’s death affected him. Fast, careless, recklessly confident, he crashed his own car not once, but twice. He wrecked his father’s car and then cracked up his father’s truck. Chrissy’s third accident, when he crashed his father’s car, alarmed Chris and Sue concerning not only his habits behind the wheel but also his level of maturity. Their boy treated his life—on land, at least—with suicidal abandon. But no matter how much they yelled at him, Chrissy’s parents backed him up, indulged him. The accidents served to leave Chrissy further and further in debt to his parents, who would always break down and lend Chrissy money for another vehicle and the increasing insurance rates he had to pay.
By late 1991, the twenty-one-year-old Chrissy was still firmly dependent on his parents. His car crashes only strengthened that dependence at a time when he should have been building a life on his own. Presumably Chrissy liked it that way—it must have made him feel more secure to be tethered to his parents. After all, when he was ten, Chrissy had been rocked by having to help take care of his father after his welding accident. Now, maybe he could erase the trauma of that event by making sure his father took care of him. His father unknowingly encouraged his fe
elings of immunity from danger behind the wheel. Insulated by his parents from the consequences of his behavior, Chrissy could believe he’d never get burned on land—or, perhaps, bent underwater.
When word of my successful recompression treatment was relayed via radio message to the Seeker, everyone on board was relieved, and even amazed. Someone suggested sending me a Seeker T-shirt on which they all wrote get-well messages. Each person took a turn writing on the T-shirt with indelible black ink. John Harding drew a cartoon which he labeled “Bernie’s porthole.” It depicted a person peering out of a round recompression chamber window, which resembled a ship’s porthole. The message was clear: In my obsession to gather portholes from the Northern Pacific, I had only landed myself close to the recompression chamber’s porthole.
The messages were an important way for my friends to express their anxiety, fear, and anger over what had happened to me. Some of the guys had been my students, and many of them had sought wreck-diving advice from me, such as the secrets to achieving successful dives on the Andrea Doria. On top of that, I was the sensible, earnest diver who had recently written guidelines on wreck-diving safety. To some of my friends, my accident was a huge disappointment, as if their favored sports team had failed to win an early playoff game. Others had to ask if their own confidence in their skills was misplaced. They felt vulnerable. If someone could cause nearly fatal problems for himself underwater after making nine successful dives to the Mount Everest of scuba diving—and bringing back the artifacts to prove it—where did that leave them? Was it worth the risk?
The Last Dive Page 25
