“Did you do your deco?”
“No.”
Crowell’s eyes widened. “You didn’t do any deco?”
“No. Pull me in.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No,” I lied. “Just get me back in.”
“Do you have gas?”
“Yeah, I got gas.”
“Okay, grab this line,” Crowell said as he handed me the line he had swum out from the boat, “and descend. I’ll go back and we’ll bring you more tanks and oxygen so you can do your deco.”
I deflated the air in my drysuit and tried to descend, but could not. The pain was already getting intense, and I was having trouble breathing. The nitrogen bubbles were overwhelming my body. I came back up. “Dan! Forget it. Pull me in. Hurry. Please.”
Crowell swam over to me. “All right. Hold on tight.” He turned and motioned Nagel to pull me in, while he swam toward the boat, holding the line. Others joined Nagel on deck and soon it looked like a tug-of-war with everyone pulling on the rope. I could feel myself moving faster and faster toward the Seeker.
Every breath was harder than the last, and I kept swallowing water through my snorkel, even though there were no waves. I spat the snorkel out, let it sink, and grabbed one of my regulators, which I put in my mouth. The pain was now searing my lungs, and I alternated grunting and screaming through my regulator as I was pulled in.
When Dan Crowell, Bill Nagel, and my dive buddies had pulled me to the Seeker’s ladder, they looked down over the stern at me. Dennis Anacker asked, “What happened? Did you have an equipment problem?”
“No. I fucked up,” I said between pained breaths.
“Okay. Climb up the ladder.”
I felt far too weak. And now my vision was being affected: The word SEEKER painted on the stern of the vessel was in triplicate.
Triple vision. I knew I was suffering neurological decompression sickness, the most severe form of the bends.
I felt nauseated. “I can’t climb,” I whispered. “I’m too weak.”
My friends stared at me, disbelieving, while Dan Crowell, still in the water next to me, caught his breath from the exertion of the swim out to get me and then helping to pull me back. When nobody moved to help me, I panted in pain, “This isn’t a drill, guys. Get me up!”
Crowell immediately tried to unclip my tank harness, but he was not familiar with the cave-diving equipment I wore. He moved my gauges and hoses with a brush of his arm and cursed as he tried desperately to find a buckle to unclip me from my tanks. He unclipped my goodie bag, looked at it, and tossed it aside to sink to the ocean bottom. Crowell seemed flustered. The pain focused me. I tapped my left hand against my right shoulder. “Relax, Dan. Here. The buckle’s here.”
After Crowell unclipped the harness, several people climbed down the ladder. I felt Anacker’s hands under my armpits and then somebody else grabbing my arms, then I was hauled up and onto the gratefully hard surface of the boat. “Can you walk?” Nagel asked.
“I think so.”
“Good! Go lie down on the table,” Nagel commanded as he pointed to the large center table where all the divers sat and geared up before their dives.
Once I was lying down, Nagel took my two diving computers off my wrist. He gasped when he saw the decompression indicator showing ninety-nine minutes. “Jesus Christ! Look at this missed deco!” he shouted. “What happened? What did you do? What the fuck did you do?”
I just looked at him, too tormented to feel guilty or angry. One of my friends gave me some water to drink. But I felt too sick to drink anything and was afraid I would throw up. Dave Dannenberg, an instructor who owned a scuba shop, came over to me and draped the hose leading to an oral-nasal mask over my hand. I knew what would come next. I had taken the “Oxygen Administration” course for divers and knew that he would recite a statement to protect him from a lawsuit if one were brought against him. “This mask is attached to pure oxygen, which is thought to be very beneficial to someone suffering a diving injury, and to their chances of recovery,” Dave recited. “I suggest you breathe the oxygen, but the choice is entirely yours.” The most important thing from a legal standpoint was that I grabbed the oxygen and placed the mask on my face, because oxygen was considered a prescription drug if someone else administered it. Even while trying to save my life, Dave had to worry about protecting himself legally. Only in America.
I grabbed the mask even before Dannenberg was finished with the statement, and I breathed the oxygen. One of my friends told me they had to remove my diving suit so that I would have better circulation. “Don’t cut it off me!” I panted, not wanting to destroy my $1,500 investment. Even in this dire circumstance I was convinced that I would be diving again soon, and I would need my suit for that. I cried out in pain as I twisted and turned to get out of the snug-fitting suit. The effort made me sweat and groan with pain. Every part of my body now hurt with my slightest movement. My insides felt as if they were being forcibly rearranged. I imagined the dinner scene in the movie Alien when the gestated creature ate its way through its human host’s stomach and popped out.
Dave Dannenberg began the field neurological examination. I knew what he was doing because I had also taken this advanced course, and I knew how important it was for everyone to track my medical condition carefully. All of my vital signs and general condition were recorded on a slate, along with the precise time each had been taken. This slate would be sent with me to the hospital so that attending medical personnel would be able to determine the best treatment for my condition.
I was slowly losing my ability to function and the feeling was leaving my extremities. My pulse steadily weakened. I went deaf in both ears, which was actually a relief because now I could no longer hear Bill Nagel screaming about how badly I had screwed up. The pain reached a new level of intensity. I closed my eyes and drifted off. But Bill did make a call for me to be evacuated by Coast Guard helicopter.
When I was in the water and had made the decision to ascend, I had reassured myself that everything would go well, and that I would be fine once I got to a recompression chamber. Now, the pain was so great and my symptoms so severe that the full realization of the seriousness of my situation dawned on me. I was facing death. Yet I knew that I did not want to die now, not here, not on the dive boat Seeker. My life couldn’t end like this. Could it? Surely, my life had to have more meaning than it already carried. I now knew that if I lived I would probably never dive again and would be lucky even to walk. And I accepted that, letting go of the dream I had. “Good-bye, Lucy,” I thought.
Lucy was not my wife. Lucy was short for the Lusitania—the luxury British ocean liner sunk by torpedoes fired from the U-20 during the First World War. Its sinking was controversial, and evidence points to Winston Churchill’s having ordered the Lusitania to an area where a German U-boat was known to be operating. Churchill—who was then Great Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty—desperately wanted the United States to enter the war on the British side, but with the strong pacifist and isolationist movements in the United States, American public opinion kept the country neutral. Churchill knew that the sinking of an ocean liner by the Germans with the subsequent loss of American lives would inflame U.S. public opinion and hasten American entry into the war to fight alongside Britain. The Lusitania sank off the southern Irish coast in 325 feet of water and took 116 American lives, and its destruction turned U.S. public opinion from isolationist to angry, leading to the entry of the United States in the war, as Churchill had hoped. Because of its depth, Lucy was an even greater challenge than the Andrea Doria and I had started thinking of the possibilities of diving it over a year earlier. Even now, even on my way to death, I was a diver.
Though the evacuation helicopter had been called, everyone on board the Seeker wondered if I was going to live long enough for the chopper to arrive and take me to a hospital equipped with a recompression chamber. Nagel himself did not hold out much hope. He had seen divers permanently crippled when th
ey missed only a few minutes of decompression, and I found out later that he doubted there was any hope for someone who had omitted over an hour and a half of decompression. He monitored the situation from the wheel-house, listening to the radio for instructions from the Coast Guard. He cursed as he imagined the tangle of paperwork and the questioning he would have to undergo when I died.
Dave Dannenberg continued to monitor my vital signs, calling out his findings to someone who wrote down the time and took notes. My pulse was hardly detectable. My skin was ashen white, the blood drained from it as my plasma thickened with nitrogen bubbles and my circulatory system fought to keep my critical organs supplied with oxygen. My friends—some of them had been diving with me for years, and some of them had been my diving students—looked on in shock.
I drifted off, my eyes closed. The pain was overwhelming. I wanted to leave it behind. Gradually, the pain eased and went away completely. Happiness and a feeling of well-being washed over me.
A bright, white light appeared before me, even though my eyes were closed. My body drifted upward, and from above I could see the Seeker, everyone aboard, and my sorry self lying on the gearing-up platform. I went into a white tunnel. I had never felt happier. I only had to float to the end of the tunnel and all my problems, all of the pain and frustration in my life, would be over. I wouldn’t care about diving anymore.
As I drifted closer to the end of the tunnel and the light got ever brighter, I suddenly heard the soothing chimes of my son’s crib merry-go-round. I remembered my wife, Diana, and our son. They needed me. And I had told Gil that I would be back.
I stopped my drift toward the end of the tunnel and struggled to turn around. I had to get back. The white light dimmed and then went away completely. I opened my eyes. Searing pain racked my body. I clenched my teeth and knew that I had to put up with the pain and fight for survival if I was ever to return to my family.
8
Voice from the Deep
OCTOBER 13, 1991. ABOARD THE DIVE BOAT SEEKER,
26 miles off the coast of Delaware,
over the wreck of the Northern Pacific.
AS I LAY ON THE PLATFORM BENCH where all of us had geared up, I was struggling just to keep on living, praying for the Coast Guard helicopter to come fast. The U.S. Coast Guard station that patrolled this area, in Cape May, New Jersey, received Bill Nagel’s call for my emergency evacuation. The call had gone out over marine radio, which meant the message had been overheard by other boat captains and crews and murmured about among the various dive-boat captains, crews, and customers, uncomfortably reminding them what was at stake every time they jumped into the water. News of an accident like mine not only serves to reinforce caution among divers; it also means that if someone else gets hurt, one potential recompression chamber is already going to be in use. If a diver in southern New Jersey, or in Delaware, was injured right after my accident, he would have to be airlifted to an alternative recompression site, farther away than the one I was heading for. The chances of a diver’s making a full recovery decrease the longer it takes to get him into a recompression chamber.
I was in luck. As I would find out later, a chopper was already fueled and warmed up, its crew having just returned from an exercise patrol when Nagel’s distress call crackled over the air to the Coast Guard dispatcher in Cape May. Although my anguish made it feel as though hours elapsed before I felt the wind disturbance of the chopper’s blades overhead, the response time was only forty-five minutes. If the chopper and crew had not been ready to go when the call came in, I would have had to wait about another half hour for the chopper to arrive at the Seeker, which would have given the nitrogen bubbles even more time to trample my organs.
As I felt the strong gusts blowing over me, I looked up and saw the white helicopter with its blue and red insignia stripes and large, bold black lettering, USCG. Although the sight was welcome, I was struck by how unnatural it was for a helicopter to be hovering only thirty feet above the Seeker’s stern. The only things we divers normally see when we are this far offshore are the occasional boats in the distance; airplanes and helicopters are something that we might see as tiny dots in the sky, not machines hovering off the stern. My hopes soared at the sight of the rescue chopper, which would whisk me to the recompression chamber that promised me a chance at recovery.
I had held out this long by focusing only on the arrival of the chopper. Now I would focus on surviving until I got to the hospital. This was the same philosophy I used when I dived: If I visualized the dive in its entirety, I would be overwhelmed at how complex it was, how much effort was required to accomplish the task. When I segmented tasks—first into getting geared up, then getting into the water, then down the anchor line, and so on—I could complete a dive that might require three or four hours of risky actions and decisions. Now that I was fighting to stay alive, when I did think of the whole process, and how long it would take for me to get into the recompression chamber, I quickly found myself despairing, my energy and will to survive draining rapidly. “You only need to hold out a little longer,” I began saying to myself. “You’re on your way. The pain’s not that bad. You can do it!”
The Seeker remained at anchor, even though the Coast Guard radioed Nagel to get under way and head into the wind. It was easier to hold a helicopter precisely in place over an object when the helicopter had wind traveling over its blades. Bill Nagel refused to move. He had his reasons. My dive buddy, Ed Dady, was still in the water decompressing, and Nagel felt that moving the boat would have put Dady’s life in danger by possible contact with the Seeker’s churning propellers. Also, Nagel reasoned that the weather was so calm that the helicopter pilot could hold the chopper precisely over the stern of the dive boat without danger of crashing due to a sudden wind gust. What Bill Nagel did not appreciate was how difficult he was making things for the helicopter pilot, who now had to use much more power and fuel to keep the chopper hovering in place. A helicopter hovering in place for a long time also risks a downward drop because of the dynamics of the wind turbulence created by its own blades. If that happened, the helicopter would crash into the Seeker, most likely killing everyone on board both the helicopter and the boat, and putting me out of my misery for good.
Dennis Anacker and John Harding—my friends from the Sea Gypsies dive club—got me upright, but my legs felt like cast iron and I could walk only with my arms draped over their shoulders. The three of us shuffled over to the wire basket the chopper had lowered to retrieve me. I dumbly looked at the basket, which resembled a cage uncovered at the top. How was I going to climb into it? It seemed a task requiring superhuman effort. I felt very tired, which was, like my confusion, a symptom of decompression sickness. Anacker and Harding lifted me up so that I only had to swing my legs over the top of the basket to climb in. That I managed. I slumped into a sitting position at the bottom of the basket.
I felt cramped, and the wind from the helicopter’s blades made me squint. I watched my friends and the dive boat get smaller and smaller as the basket and I were winched upward. The closer I got to the chopper, the more difficult it became to breathe; the air was so turbulent—like sticking your face out of the window of a speeding car—that I had to tuck my head down to get a breath. When the top of the basket was level with the chopper’s floor, a man in a flight jumpsuit and a dark-green helmet reached out to me, grabbed me under the arms, and pulled me into the machine. In front of me, I saw two seats side by side, both occupied by men who were also dressed in flight suits and helmets. The man to my left gave a thumbs-up signal, which was returned by the man who had dragged me aboard. I lay behind the seats, on the chopper’s metal floor. I could feel the machine’s increased vibration as it lifted upward and sped off, away from the scene of my stupidity.
At last, I was finally on the way to the hospital. I could relax. But the Coast Guard man attending to me seemed to be shouting something.
I shook my head, pointed to my ear, and said, “I’m deaf.”
“What happened?” mouthed back the man.
“I fucked up.”
He looked at me, frowned, then nodded his head.
I made a shivering motion by folding my arms around my body and rocking back and forth. He got a blanket and covered me. Warmth. The first bit of comfort I had allowed myself to feel in a long time.
The chopper quivered fiercely as we flew and flew. Where were they taking me? I struggled to remember which recompression chambers were in the area. Duke University in North Carolina? New York City? Or maybe someplace else? The Coast Guard personnel attending to me saw that I was ashen white and listless, which indicated to him that I was in severe shock. He tried to inject me with adrenaline. When I saw him pull a syringe from his medical bag, I welcomed it, hoping that the injection would give me more strength and ease the pain and discomfort I felt. But I watched in dismay as the medic unsuccessfully probed my arms for a vein. Although I have been told by medical personnel that my veins are very good and easy to find for injections, the level of shock I was undergoing had caused the veins in my arms to collapse. The medic’s face clouded over as he kept trying. Finally he shook his head while he mouthed the words “I can’t find it. Sorry.”
My hopes sank. I felt very weak. I looked longingly at the syringe in the man’s hand. How much energy did I have left? I forced myself to breathe in and out, fearing that if I did not make this conscious effort my body would quit trying. I looked at the Coast Guard man and mouthed back, “It’s okay. Thanks anyway.”
The effort to make the words poured gasoline on my pain. I reached out and held his hand in street-style greeting, trying to gain some life-giving energy from him, as if he were a newly charged battery and I were a fading flashlight. It must have looked as though we were arm-wrestling for life.
At last, after what seemed a generation, the helicopter landed. The Coast Guard man attending to me opened the doorway and I looked outside, trying to figure out where I was. All I saw was blue sky and a low brick wall. I learned later that we landed on the roof of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Several medical personnel ran toward the machine with a gurney, and rolled me onto it. The Coast Guard man went inside the building with me and handed the nurse the slate which the guys on the Seeker had used to keep track of my medical condition. I was wheeled into the hospital’s emergency room and then into an area that the nurse curtained off.
The Last Dive Page 24