The team needed to know the condition of Chrissy’s blood and had a sample taken. The results were not good. Instead of normal blood, the syringe contained foam. There were so many nitrogen bubbles in Chrissy’s system that his body could not expel them quickly enough through exhalation. With nowhere to go, the nitrogen bubbles fizzed in Chrissy’s circulatory system. Chrissy’s blood could not carry oxygen to his muscles, and his brain would be more and more affected. While he was being slowly killed by his deep dive, the depth of that dive was also the only thing that was keeping Chrissy alive: Because he had been under increased pressure, the oxygen in the air he had breathed underwater, as well as the pure oxygen he breathed after he surfaced, caused the oxygen in his system to be at a high surface tension, and it was this oxygen that Chrissy’s body was now metabolizing.
“We couldn’t get the debris out of our way inside the wreck, and it was all silty, so we couldn’t see anything,” Chrissy told Butler, as he grew increasingly breathless. “Then we saw the outside light every once in a while. It was so confusing. It felt like I was dreaming, and like I was hallucinating. It was like the wreck was grabbing me, trying to pull me further back into it. We were just crazy to dive this thing on air. It was the air, it was the air.”
“You mean the air was bad?” Butler asked. Maybe the air in Chrissy’s scuba tanks was contaminated with carbon monoxide. This can happen if the compressor used to fill the scuba tank does not have the proper filter on it, or if the air intake is improperly placed so that the exhaust from either the compressor or another internal combustion engine gets sucked into the compressor and then into the scuba tank. Even a small amount of carbon monoxide can kill a diver.
“No. No. The air was good. It was just crazy to dive this wreck on air. Crazy!” Chrissy lamented.
The nurses attending to Chrissy worked fast to get him out of his diving garments. They needed complete access to his body and could not put him into the chamber wearing anything but cotton, because clothing made from synthetic materials could create static electricity, which could cause a fire or explosion in the high-pressure air environment inside. According to Butler, Chrissy was inside the chamber within fifteen minutes of his arrival at the hospital. Butler worked the outside of the chamber, while a doctor and a nurse attended to Chrissy within the chamber. Butler decided to keep Chrissy on pure oxygen and take him down to a pressure equivalent to 60 feet, then see how the diver responded to that treatment. The increased pressure would start to reduce the nitrogen bubbles in Chrissy’s system, and would even force some of the nitrogen back into a dissolved state in the blood, muscles, and other tissues. The increased pressure would also force pure oxygen into the bloodstream and then into the tissues. When Chrissy got to depth, he cried out in pain, a common occurrence at this stage of treatment because the circulation was returning to Chrissy’s body as the nitrogen bubbles in his bloodstream were reduced in size. It is like the feeling of pins and needles when the circulation returns to your arm or leg after it has “fallen asleep,” only much worse.
Although a bent diver’s pain can be excruciating, it is also a sign to medical personnel that the treatment is progressing well. For the first time, Butler began to feel hopeful that one member of this diving team might survive. After a few minutes at 60 feet, the team decided to send Chrissy down to a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of 165 feet. According to the theory of bubble mechanics, this depth should reduce the size of the nitrogen bubbles to a little more than half their original size. Butler turned the knobs that released compressed air into the chamber, and watched the pressure gauges as the needles moved rapidly to the 165-foot pressure mark.
The scenario that transpired over the next few hours is one that Glenn Butler has since gone over repeatedly with as many hyperbaric experts as he could. All of them have given Butler the same answer: Because Chrissy had been diving at 230 feet depth and he was now at a pressure equivalent to only 165 feet, the bubbles would be reduced only slightly; nothing short of a recompression to extreme depths—anywhere from 300 to 400 feet—and a long saturation treatment lasting several days, as well as a complete blood transfusion, could effectively have eliminated the nitrogen bubbles in Chrissy’s body.
But medical technology has its limits, and one of those limits is the pressure rating of the hyperbaric chamber. Applying too great a pressure to the hyperbaric chamber would have been blown out the chamber’s seals, causing deadly explosive decompression to Chrissy and the medical staffers attending him. There were simply precious few chambers in the world equipped to take a diver down past 165 feet, and the Jacobi facility was not one of them. Even if the facility could take Chrissy below 165 feet, such a treatment was entirely experimental. The team was following published diving treatment protocol. Chambers that could take a diver deeper were specially constructed for navies, commercial diving companies, or researchers; they were generally not available for the treatment of a bent sport diver. The most advanced chamber in the country belonged to the U.S. Navy’s Experimental Diving Unit, at Panama City, Florida. Butler knew that even they would have had their hands full with the complexities of treating a patient who was as far along with the ravages of the bends as Chrissy. Plus, Chrissy would probably never have lived long enough to be airlifted to Florida. For Chrissy, it was all or nothing in the Jacobi chamber.
At two-thirty in the afternoon, Chrissy regained movement and feeling in his lower extremities. “Where’s my father?” he asked, grimacing in pain.
“He’s being treated in a separate chamber,” the doctor lied. The young man needed his strength to fight the bends. If Chrissy knew that his father was dead, he would probably be so overcome with grief that he would not have the resolve to keep the battle going.
Chrissy’s pain was incredible. He screamed. Then he screamed more as his blood pulsed through his body, further awakening his senses to the abuse his body had endured. To Butler and his team, Chrissy’s hideous cries were excruciating, as if their healing chamber had been converted to a medieval torture device. Butler ordered the overhead communications between the inside and the outside of the chamber to be turned off. The medical personnel switched to headset communications. They could not bear to do otherwise.
Sue Rouse had been contacted by the Coast Guard and informed that her husband and son had been in a diving accident and were now in the hospital. She was told nothing further about their condition. As she was driven by Denny and Eleanor Willis the three hours across Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey to the hospital, she thought that she would be reunited with her loved ones—hurt perhaps, but alive. She had always feared this would happen. They were tough, healthy, vigorous. They would beat back the bends or whatever else had ambushed them. They had to live.
As Sue Rouse headed to the hospital, the pressure on Chrissy’s body was being reduced, according to the schedule prescribed in U.S. Navy Recompression Table 6-A, a treatment I had successfully undergone only one year earlier. After five and a half hours in the chamber, having successfully gone from 165 feet to the pressure equivalent of 60 feet, Chrissy now breathed pure oxygen and was gradually brought up to a pressure equivalent to 30 feet. But the team could see that Chrissy was not responding well to the decreased pressure. There were no more cries from the young man, who lay still on the gurney. Chrissy had passed out. The team decided to take Chrissy back down to 60 feet. But before they could do so, Chrissy’s strong, young heart failed. CPR could not revive him. Chrissy was declared dead at 19:50, or 7:50 P.M.
Sue arrived at the hospital only moments after Chrissy died. When she got to the emergency room, she was told that her husband and son were both dead. It was completely unexpected news and it shattered her.
As Sue was being comforted by Denny and Eleanor, the doctor informed them that somebody had to identify the bodies. Through her tears, Sue gasped, “I’ll do it. Let me see them.”
“You don’t want to do this, Sue,” Denny said. “Let me take care of this for you.” Although identify
ing his friends’ bodies would be difficult enough for him, he knew it would be far worse for Sue. Denny was a diving instructor and had gotten interested in cave diving through the Rouses’ enthusiasm for it and their insistence that he go down to Ginnie Springs and take the cave-diving classes. After his first trip, Denny was hooked on cave diving, the Rouses’ high-energy spirit, and what seemed to him their slapstick humor.
“No, Denny. I need to see them.”
Chrissy’s body had been wheeled out of the hyperbaric chamber and now lay on a gurney inside a curtained section of the emergency room. As she walked toward her son, it looked to Sue as if he were merely asleep. She gently reached over and touched his hand. It was still warm. Though she stood frozen in grief, she had an urge to grab Chrissy, shake him, and say, “I’m here, Chrissy. I’m here. It’s all right now. Wake up!”
She remembered the time when she was pregnant with Chrissy and just married. She and Chris watched a movie on television called Angel in My Pocket. During the movie, Chris reached over and gently rubbed Sue’s stomach. “You’ve got an angel in your pocket,” he said. Now her angel was gone.
Her husband’s body had already been taken to the Bronx morgue. Denny again offered to spare Sue the ordeal, but again she refused his offer. The morgue was now closed and they would have to return to New York City the next day to accomplish that grim task.
In her husband she had lost her best friend, someone she had literally grown up with, known since high school, even before her adult life began. Although many people perceived the Rouses as bickering all the time, Sue thought of it merely as communicating. It was their style of interaction, the way that they had grown accustomed to dealing with each other over the course of their well-cemented, long-term relationship. She knew that Chris loved her deeply and would do anything for her, including building a house with his own hands and putting her desires before his own, instead of buying the airplane he had wanted. And his willingness to work hard made him a good provider. Chris went diving often, but he also included the family in his activity whenever they could all go. Sue thought that as a husband and father, Chris was far better than many men who would go off and frequently spend time alone with their buddies, or at a bar. And with Chrissy she had had the challenge of motherhood, which she had not thought would come so early in her life but which she had nonetheless embraced.
One of the questions that divers still ask today is this: Would the Rouses have been able to save themselves if they had been breathing mixed gas, which would have given them clearer heads at depth? Chrissy’s statements to Butler indicated he had gotten trapped inside the U-boat, and that his struggle to get out of the wreck led him to hallucinate underwater. As Butler understood it at the time, Chrissy’s problem was one of survival while deep and breathing air. Some divers think helium gases would have helped father and son survive; they argue that if Chrissy had been breathing mixed gas, which he had been trained to use and which he had experience deploying underwater, his mind would not have been as clouded as the interior of the wreck itself. Possibly he would have been able to extricate himself. In that case, the theory goes, Chrissy would have been able to exit the wreck without his father’s even having to come in and get him out, and the two men would have been able to find their extra scuba tanks on the U-boat’s deck and then conduct their full decompression. They might have been rattled and scared, but they would have survived unscathed.
Other divers disagree, pointing out that even though breathing mixed gas would have given Chrissy a much clearer head, it would not have ensured that he would have been able to rescue himself. If Chris had had to heft the shelf off of his son while the two were breathing mixed gas, they would have consumed their gas at a much faster rate because it was lighter than compressed air and offered less breathing resistance. Panting with exertion, they might well have run out of breathing gas and died inside the wreck. Also, if they had ascended without any decompression after breathing mixed gas at 230 feet, the molecularly lighter helium gas would have bubbled in their bodies even faster than the nitrogen did, and they both would probably have died even sooner.
As it was, Chrissy survived for three hours and did make it into the recompression chamber, where over five hours his symptoms even started to abate: The feeling returned to his legs, and the paralysis he experienced from the nipples down seemed resolved as he moved his legs and hips. Why, then, did he die in the recompression chamber? Was there a better treatment he could have been given? Or perhaps some medication? The sad truth lay in the autopsy. When doctors removed Chrissy’s heart and then opened it underwater, the ventricles released foam, not blood. There were simply too many nitrogen bubbles that Chrissy’s body had to eliminate before foam formed in the heart.
As Dr. Bill Hamilton describes it, Chrissy’s heart experienced “vapor lock.” Hamilton explains it this way: “The heart is a pump designed to push fluid through it. Like any pump, if air gets into the system, the pump just squeezes on the vapor over and over and nothing happens; it just can’t function. That’s what happened to Chrissy.” But was there some other treatment that Chrissy could have been given? Hamilton muses briefly about the answer. “I’ve thought about that a lot. In theory, you might have been able to put him down under far greater pressure, perhaps even using helium as a recompression gas. But in reality, there are so few chambers in the world, and so few hyperbaric technicians or doctors—even today, forget 1992—that could handle a deep helium recompression treatment, that no, I don’t think it would have been possible, unless everything had been planned way in advance. Realistically, there’s nothing that could have been done to save him, under the circumstances. Both Chrissy and his father were dead when they hit the surface. The only thing that surprised me was that Chris died as quickly as he did and that Chrissy lasted as long as he did.”
It’s a lesson for the many divers who today are plunging deeper than the Rouses ever did, and taking greater risks. Yet even today, deaths still occur while divers use mixed gases, and also while they dive breathing air; deaths still occur in both deep and in shallow ranges. The water is still an alien, unforgiving world, just as it was when humans ventured into the depths thousands of years ago, first out of curiosity and then out of greed.
What might have saved the Rouses—even after everything that had happened to them—was underwater communications equipment that would have allowed them to talk to the surface, and also to Steve McDougall, who was not far away, decompressing, when the Rouses ascended. If they could have let crew and buddies know what was going on, extra scuba tanks could have been lowered to the Rouses. Then, no matter what happened to them inside the U-boat, they would have been able to decompress in the water and avoid the bubble buildup that killed them both. As it was, they essentially died deep and alone.
The news of the disaster swept like a typhoon through the diving community even before Chris and Chrissy had been declared dead. The emergency radio call that Seeker’s captain, Dan Crowell, had made to the Coast Guard, as well as the radio messages back and forth between the helicopter and the Seeker, had been picked up by other boat captains in the area. When the Seeker returned to port, divers from another dive boat that had gotten back earlier lined the pier, and extended their condolences and offers of help to those on board.
When the Seeker pulled into port and docked, Barb Lander, John Chatterton, Steve McDougall, John Yurga, Steve Gatto, Tom Packer, Richie Kohler, and Dan Crowell could only sit on the vessel, in shock. Instead of the usual, almost festive mood among divers that accompanies the successful completion of an expedition, the atmosphere was somber, and everyone was quiet, lost in their own thoughts. Though many of them had seen death before—on a dive boat, on a battlefield, or in the course of police work—it was still numbing that two of their fellow divers had been struck by catastrophe at the same time.
At Tim Stumpf’s house in Horsham, Pennsylvania, where Chrissy had lived periodically when he had enough money to live free of his parents, a small cro
wd of men and women began gathering on the lawn, trying to gain solace from one another. When word reached them that both Rouses had died, everyone was stunned. Now, three of their top guns, including Ed Sollner, who also used to hang out at Tim’s, had died within four months. Everyone who gathered that night on the lawn thought about their own diving, and many of them decided to put an end to their dreams of diving deep to recover artifacts, or to find new forms of life, or just for the sheer thrill of it.
Chrissy’s girlfriend, Julia, was there, as part of the impromptu wake. Her romance with Chrissy had taken her by storm; it was even a bond they had both sought to avoid for some time, before they gave in to their mutual attraction and started dating. It had blossomed into such a relaxed and rewarding relationship that it seemed they had always been together, a bond as sturdy as that of Chrissy’s parents. Julia could only recall how sensitive and giving Chrissy had been to her; he had never forced or rushed the relationship as other young men had tried to do. Julia found Chrissy’s approach refreshing, his attentions as direct and soothing as a trade wind over a fertile island. How could her perfect relationship have ended this way? She wanted to believe Chrissy’s death was a nightmare she could awake from and tell him about. But the nightmare went on and on, and she did not awake. She consoled herself with the fact that she had not taken Chrissy for granted—she had known how special the relationship was, although she had never been able to admit to herself he could be stolen from her by the deep: She always thought Chrissy’s skills were far too good for anything bad to happen to him underwater.
Chrissy’s old, beat-up car stood in Tim’s driveway. Somebody had to drive it back to Sue Rouse’s house. Julia decided to return it herself, as if being in the car could somehow put her in touch with Chrissy again. As she drove toward Sue’s house, she played Chrissy’s favorite song, “Even Flow,” by Pearl Jam. It was difficult for her to see the road; it was as if a black cloud hovered over the car and emptied tears over the windshield. When Julia arrived at Sue’s house she was amazed that she had not skidded off the road and ruined the car, as Chrissy had done several times with his vehicles.
The Last Dive Page 36