I felt that I had somehow become very, very old, very quickly. Would my mind continue to fray so that I would be left slurring, groping for words, like Glenn Butler? Or perhaps I would be left both mentally and physically impaired, my arms trembling, maybe unable to properly grasp things with my hands, like my childhood hero, Muhammad Ali? Had Evie Dudas, Glenn Butler, and I—like Ali—taken too many hits and been left permanently damaged?
Unwilling to give up the sport, I continued diving. Although Diana knew that my diving might lead to my being crippled or killed, she saw how much I loved the underwater world and the calming effect it had on me and she did not protest my continued involvement in the sport.
Just as diving had given me experiences that are precious and enlivening, so has my recovery from the major symptoms of decompression sickness given me a renewed commitment to my own aliveness. When Dr. Hunt and I celebrated over dinner our fiftieth and fortieth birthdays, respectively, we both assessed our lives at our milestones. When she lamented getting old, I told her that when you have faced the very real possibility of not getting old, you welcome aging. Each day I’m thankful for another chance to experience life, my family, and the occasional foray into deep water.
John Reekie, the Canadian diver who participated in Team Doria ’91, also experiences continuing medical problems that may be related to diving. In 1993, Reekie dived with John Moyer’s ambitious expedition to recover priceless art panels from the Andrea Doria and the ship’s second bell. When the team brought up intact two 1,000-pound art panels by Guido Gambone, their success drew international media attention. The Doria’s second bell remained elusive.
During Moyer’s expedition, Reekie had been assigned to look for the bell in an old paint locker. He conducted several dives where he worked inside the paint locker with an underwater vacuum cleaner called an airlift that sucks up mud and silt to dig around and find the bell. Reekie repeatedly swam through the opening at 220 feet and then into the locker at 210 feet and buried himself headfirst and waist-deep in the paint locker’s silt as he groped for the bell. Almost immediately, he was struck with anguishing headaches, which he thought would go away once he withdrew from the compartment. Instead, they only got worse when he ascended. Reekie theorized that his body had absorbed the highly toxic lead-based paint residue and paint thinner buried in the silt. He continues to suffer various medical problems, including lung and skin maladies, that he attributes to this particular expedition.
Moyer disputes the idea that the Doria dives in the paint locker caused Reekie’s woes. Some divers say that Reekie’s problems are the result of being an overweight chain-smoker. His health issues are probably precipitated by some combination of his weight problem, his smoking habits, and his diving experiences: Not only was Reekie immersed in toxic chemicals during Moyer’s Doria expedition, but during his diving career he also repeatedly exposed his body to extreme stress during dives that required many hours of decompression.
Of course, the physical problems that Evie Dudas, Glenn Butler, John Reekie, and I face might have been caused solely by some other medical problem, or they might be a combination of other medical problems and damage from the bends. In spite of myriad medical advances, doctors can never know for certain, which frustrates them.
Divers had complex perceptions of the medical doctors who treated them when they got bent, as Dr. Hunt noted in her psychological and sociological study of bent divers. According to Dr. Hunt, divers, doctors, paramedics, and nurses categorized people into those whose hits were “deserved”—for example, a diver who had done something stupid like omitting two hours of decompression—and those whose hits were “undeserved”—such as a diver who dived by the book but still got bent. Just as I had detected something like contempt from the doctor who first treated me in the recompression chamber, other divers had experienced medical personnel’s disdain for someone whose symptoms meant that fate had done justice. Dr. Hunt theorized that the categorizing of divers into those with deserved and undeserved hits allowed medical personnel a clear conscience if they could not successfully treat a bent diver or if the diver suffered residual damage.
To complicate matters, however, not all medical personnel exhibited disdain when bent divers were brought in for treatment. Personnel who treated the Rouses grasped the tragedy of the situation immediately when they were confronted with a dead man and his son who was still trying to beat the odds and live. Had they not been compassionate, they would have likely told Chrissy that his father was dead when Chrissy seemed to be recovering during his treatment and asked about his father. Someone like Glenn Butler, who treated Chrissy in the chamber, could empathize with Chrissy because Glenn had been a diver and had been bent. To this day, Glenn is clearly bothered at not having been able to save Chrissy, even though the veteran diver and hyperbaric specialist knows that it was virtually impossible to save the young man’s life under the circumstances. Doctors and other medical personnel are subject to the same range of human emotions as the rest of us; sometimes they can be overwhelmed with a bad bends case, and at other times the potential tragedy of the situation grips them as they strive to wear an unemotional mask and go about their job “professionally.”
Other divers placed distance between themselves and someone who suffered a “deserved” hit. If the diver had done something stupid that you felt you would never do, then you could separate yourself from his foolhardy mistakes—and so believe that you’d never get the bends yourself. Dr. Hunt found much more empathy for a diver who had suffered an “undeserved” hit because others knew that they too could do everything correctly and still fall victim to a cruel cave or a capricious sea.
Dr. Hunt’s 1993 AquaCorps article, “Straightening Out the Bends: Ongoing Research on the Social Reaction and Stigma Surrounding Decompression Illness,” was met with disbelief and even anger by the diving medical community. It appeared just pages from the report of my bout with the bends and a detailed account of the Rouses’ fatal dive. Soon, however, the Divers Alert Network (DAN), a large, prestigious nonprofit organization dedicated to diving research and the medical treatment of bent amateur divers, based at Duke University in North Carolina, went on to publish in its journal, Alert Diver, another article by Dr. Hunt about the bends and the stigma surrounding it. Other magazines followed suit. Therapists, sociologists, psychologists, diving researchers, and others started giving presentations at diving conferences about various aspects of psychology as it related to diving. Menduno, AquaCorps, and Dr. Hunt had initiated a vital dialogue meant to encourage divers to pursue their underwater quests safely and consciously. With a greater awareness of what it was in their psyches and histories that spurred them to dive, they could assess risk wisely and better correlate their challenges and their skills and avoid unnecessary risks. For example, reenacting unresolved relationship conflicts with a dive buddy might lead to taking unnecessary risks that in turn resulted in a diver’s getting bent. Being aware, divers could make more conscious decisions. And they would have the insight to refrain from stigmatizing someone who had been bent.
By the mid-1990s Dr. Hunt was receiving letters of thanks from divers around the world. Her articles had helped them come to terms with their own case of the bends, or avoid getting bent in the first place by leading them to examine their own psychic conflicts and motivations. Dr. Peter Bennett, the head of DAN, sent Dr. Hunt a glowing letter heralding the importance of her work to both the diving and the medical communities. Though Dr. Hunt’s study has concluded and she has moved on to other interests, her work has had a great impact on many divers, who have reexamined their diving habits, and on medical personnel, who are now more sensitive to the issues a bent diver faces. Every diver benefits when all of us know not just how we dive but why.
The advances in technical diving now could be matched by progress in understanding the psychosocial motives of men and women who employ those technical advances and risk their lives to plunge deeper and deeper. Chris and Chrissy Rouse did not survive
long enough to take advantage of the science and psychology that might have kept them alive. Yet both men were headstrong, and so possibly neither would ever have stopped to examine the reasons he sacrificed so much to explore caves, the sea, and shipwrecks. And certainly today, many divers are so consumed with lust for adventure that they do not heed reason. Yet Dr. Hunt and her colleagues have saved lives.
If Chris and Chrissy Rouse were today to break the ocean surface bent, it is possible that they could be treated instantly with recompression. But it is not certain. Today’s technical dive teams have available to them portable recompression chambers, which did not exist in 1992. Yet sport-diving boats, including those that cater to technical divers, do not usually carry these devices. The reason is economic: The portable chambers are expensive, costing roughly thirty thousand to fifty thousand dollars, depending on the features and the pressure capability. Weighed against this expense is their ability to recompress a bent diver immediately, usually to a depth equivalent of 33 feet or 66 feet, one or two additional atmospheres of pressure, and keep the diver under pressure while he or she is transported to a bigger recompression facility, which can put the victim under greater pressure, and further reduce the bubbles of inert gas that devastate the diver’s body. With the increased use of helium mixes, which are much lighter than the nitrogen in compressed air, a diver experiencing the bends from omitted deep stops will start to bubble very quickly, leaving precious little time to begin treatment that could save the diver’s life, or reduce the long-term damage to the body.
Thus far, most sport-diving operations have shunned tools like portable recompression chambers, claiming that they are too expensive. Even equipment that is less expensive than a portable chamber, but still capable of providing added safety, underwater communications equipment, is seen by the majority of sport divers as imposing too great an expense burden while adding another item of gear that could malfunction. There is some merit to this argument. Yet underwater communications equipment would allow a problem to be reported while divers are still underwater, where they can be assisted by other divers before matters get to the point where they have to rely on luck to survive. The technical issues involved with using underwater communications equipment while breathing helium gases, which distorts the voice, do pose a problem for sport divers who wish to use as their medium radio signals, instead of cables connected to each other. These issues, like any other in the history of diving, are not beyond resolution, however.
Like many people who engage in high-risk activities, divers like to deny or downplay the risks they face. Most divers say that they do not need expensive equipment like underwater communications gear and portable recompression chambers because they will not make mistakes, and nothing will happen to them. But diving is a sport where people rely on life-support equipment to go into an alien environment. Things can and do go wrong. As Dr. Bill Hamilton says, “The best way to treat an accident is to be prepared for it, to have the training, the equipment, and the personnel on hand to deal with it.” Hamilton likes to remind divers that the bends itself is not an accident—it is a statistically predictable event, one that will occur in a certain percentage of dives, regardless of how good a diver is or what precautions are taken. His philosophy is summed up by the words on the button he wears at diving conferences: SHIT HAPPENS.
Technical divers know and accept the risks of diving without a chamber on site, but they usually do so while denying they can have an accident in the first place. I denied the possibility and I’m sure Chris and Chrissy did, even after we had discussed my accident so many times. Ironically, the more experience a diver has, the greater he thinks his immunity to an accident—because it happened to someone else, not him: Complacency leads divers to take ever greater risks. Without a recompression chamber at the dive site, divers like Chris and Chrissy Rouse will keep dying, while some divers like me and Evie Dudas will get lucky and survive to dive another day. And without underwater communications gear, divers will continue to die every year because they cannot communicate with each other or, like the Rouses, cannot ask for help from the surface. In spite of all the human-engineered gear required to go more than 10 feet under and stay there for any appreciable time, divers implicitly view voice communications as unsporting, as if by talking they would somehow cheat the silence of the deep. Without these tools, divers are lone wolves; if they run into trouble underwater, there are many things that will readily claim them, and then only luck will be able to rescue them. It seems that people who pride themselves on their technological prowess and physical skills should not have to rely on chance. Divers can greatly increase the odds of surviving an accident by using all of the available technology, not just some of it.
Diving does not occur in a cultural vacuum. Risk taking in itself has become a hallmark of our society: Many of us take extreme risks in our sports, in our financial endeavors, our sex lives. It is as if we cannot get enough of the thrill of living, and must enhance the thrill by the risks we experience like an elixir. And in spite of the dangers of diving and the means to avert its perils, many divers seek extreme risks underwater, and some even do so on the surface as well.
Bill Nagel, the owner of the Seeker, the dive boat from which the Rouses conducted their last dive, was by all accounts an excellent deep-wreck diver and a valuable teacher of other accomplished divers, like John Chatterton. Nagel dived deep and often, exhibiting what some would call a passion for the sport but others would call compulsive behavior. He also exhibited extreme compulsion on land, where he frequently consumed alcohol in great quantity. In 1994, after repeatedly being hospitalized for alcohol-related illness and ultimately being warned that he would die if he ever drank again, Nagel literally drowned in his own blood after drinking hard liquor, which caused a blood vessel in his throat to split open. “Bill Nagel helped discover the U-Who and he never got to dive it because of his alcohol-related health problems,” John Chatterton says now. “Bill was my mentor in diving—almost like a father to me—and I hoped that the discovery of the U-boat would motivate him to overcome his personal demons and get better. But the alcohol was too powerful a force for Bill, and in the end, I think he was frustrated that he could not overcome it.”
Sheck Exley—the Michael Jordan of cave diving, the diver whom Chrissy Rouse admired so much—persisted in his attempt to dive to a depth of 1,000 feet using standard scuba equipment and also numerous breathing-gas mixtures. In 1994, at a depth of 906 feet in Mante, a Mexican cave where he had previously set the world record for deep scuba diving at 867 feet, he died. Exley’s body was recovered only because he had wrapped himself in the heavy plumb line that served as his guide to the bottom. Presumably to make sure his body could be retrieved, Exley bound the line around his body after he realized he had miscalculated the dive and did not have enough gas to ascend.
The Briton Rob Palmer was another diver whose work enthralled and motivated many divers, including the Rouses and me. His Deep into Blue Holes described his explorations of Bahamian caves, including the discovery of life forms scientists thought to be extinct. He dived in the Red Sea repeatedly to over 400 feet in depth while breathing compressed air, a practice he had publicly recommended against. He knew he was playing Russian roulette. Palmer was last seen descending past 400 feet in the Red Sea. His body was never recovered.
Palmer’s death shocked many people. The British diver exhibited a gentleman’s grace and charm and was extremely well liked in addition to being widely respected for the many television documentaries, books, and articles he produced. Yet his wife, the diver and macro-biologist Dr. Stephanie Schwabe, was not surprised he died diving. “I fell in love with Rob and married him even though I knew I would never spend the rest of my life with him,” she told me. “I knew that he took too many risks and that he would die underwater. The odd thing was that because so many things had happened to Rob underwater and he had survived them all, he thought he was immune to death in the water.” Dr. Schwabe readily admits she was smi
tten by Palmer’s boyish charm. “I decided I was going to enjoy whatever time we would have together,” she said simply, fatalistically.
Perhaps the most startling behavior was exhibited by Marc Eyring, the tall, rugged, and extremely intelligent former Green Beret who had been Steve Berman’s cave-diving coach, as well as the diving instructor of Chris Rouse, Chrissy, Sue, and me. Like Nagel, Eyring often dived deep between bouts of hard drinking. After the Rouses’ deaths Eyring had gotten married and moved to the North and seemed to have dropped completely out of touch with the diving community. After some years of mysterious silence, Berman received a letter from Eyring, who explained that he had gotten divorced, had a sex-change operation, and now went by the name Karen.
For years Berman could not talk to anyone about Eyring’s revelation. As he recently explained to me, “He had been my mentor, the guy I looked up to like a cave-diving god. I mean, he was perfect in the water, and such a dedicated instructor. I wanted to be just like him.” He chuckled grimly. “At first, I wished that Marc had died instead of doing what he did. Gradually, I realized that my thinking was selfish. If changing into a woman fulfills Marc, then that’s his choice. It’s just hard for me to accept, and I hope that … she … finally feels happiness.”
I contacted Karen to interview her for this book. Over the phone, I could hear the same intense person I had always known, the voice more sinuous maybe, but the urgency as evident as ever. She came to visit me at my home. Although I had braced myself, I was still a bit shocked to see my friend in blue jeans, a woman’s blouse—which her operation and hormonal supplements allowed her to fill out generously—and hair that now flowed past her shoulders. Her subtle makeup softened but did not disguise the masculine face I remembered from almost a decade earlier. Karen had achieved success in the commercial banking world, and made money with her personal investments. She finished her Ph.D. and then went on to start her own company designing and building a new type of magnetic resonance imaging machine incorporating technology that she herself had pioneered. As we strolled on my property, Karen remarked, “Bernie, I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy. I just pour myself into my work. I think that my intellectual ability and knowledge are just starting to come together. There’s so much I want to do in the world of technology and so many exciting possibilities. I’ve accepted that I’m brilliant and I’m different. Maybe that’s the best I can hope for.” But why would Marc change into Karen? “I realized that all of my extreme behavior was just a way to overcome my feelings and desires to be a woman,” she explained.
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