One Breath by Adam Skolnick

Author:Adam Skolnick
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

I felt extremely vulnerable [at 88 meters] without anything on my feet. My mind got the better of my body and my emotions took over. I panicked and raced to the surface instead of relaxing and accepting the vulnerability. I burned through all my reserves…

If only he’d let the thoughts pass and pulled up slowly and confidently, he might have made it. Instead, he rushed, and with each stressful pull and panicked thought, oxygen burned. Three minutes into the dive, as he approached Shedd, he signaled that he was in distress, but Shedd didn’t recognize the signal. Kirk did, and quickly relayed it to the next safety down, Robert Lee. Lee swam to Nick, who blacked out in his arms at 30 meters. “It was the most horrible blackout I’d ever seen,” said Shedd.

Lee secured Nick’s airway by placing one hand over his nose and the other under the chin and began kicking up. Two more safeties, including Ren, kicked down to 20 meters and helped Lee swim Nick to the surface. At the surface Nick remained out for fifteen seconds, while the safeties called his name, blew across his eyes, and tapped his cheek. No luck.

“He didn’t come around right away so we started doing ventilations,” Shedd said. “I did two or three ventilations and he woke up with this dead, thousand-mile stare, and then blood just started spewing.”

Deep-water blackouts are uncommon in freediving and they are almost always accompanied by pulmonary edema, and sometimes pulmonary hemorrhage. When Nick came to, he coughed up pink froth. The blood and plasma, which was shunted to his core and engorged his alveolar capillaries (blood vessels in his lungs) thanks to the mammalian dive reflex, had leaked into his air sacs, like water from leaky pipes. Shedd placed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, and that positive pressure helped move the fluid from his lungs back into the bloodstream. He recovered quickly, occasionally removing the mask to spit globs of red blood into the rippling blue.

There was a fifteen-minute delay in the competition while the safety team took care of Nick, and another fifteen to give them time to rest, but a whole day of diving lay ahead, and the competition went on. Kerry was next on the line and had been in the water preparing to dive when this happened. “There was a lot of blood,” she said, and it shook her up. Her dive was stressful. Fear had crept in and followed her deep. The stress sapped her oxygen stores and she blacked out at the surface. So did the next diver. The one after that turned early.

Shedd disqualified Nick for the remainder of the depth competition. But that didn’t stop him from going back to the doctor every day, professing how much better he felt, and asking for one more open-water dive. Shedd wouldn’t budge. Nick also approached Kerry for her opinion. “I told him to take a break, but he wanted an exact time [when his lungs would be healed], and I couldn’t give it to him.

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