Our holiday to a remote island off the north east coast of Australia was supposed to be our last trip away as a family. The kids are getting older now, and soon they won’t want to come on vacation with us. For this reason, we thought we’d make is an extra special holiday, and went out to visit my wife’s rich friend on her private island. Vanessa’s island was superb and the girls loved it. I was expecting them to have a hard time of pulling their eyes away from screens and gadgets, but I guess the sun and sand was good for them. Little did we expect that the holiday would come to an abrupt end with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Near Melbourne, before we left, we were thinking far ahead in case of emergencies, so it was lucky we had that backup plan.
Here’s what happened. We were on the speedboat heading out for a scuba expedition. Venessa was strapping the girls in with their weight belts and preparing the scuba gear. When we found the spot, we were all really excited for the scuba diving. So we jumped in. I could tell something was wrong when I saw my younger daughter Julie flailing around in the deep. She looked like she was struggling, then I saw her sink right down into a trench. That’s when I knew the weighted belt was too much for her. Vanessa managed to dive after her, and unstrap the belt while they were underwater. But Julie had gone too deep too fast. By the time we had her back on the boat, she was suffering from acute decompression sickness. As I mentioned earlier, we had prepared by purchasing a portable hyperbaric chamber. We carted Julie back to the holiday home for hyperbaric medicine. In Melbourne, we never expected the worst case scenario to happen, but it was certainly a good thing that we had come prepared. Julie got better, but sadly our trip was cut short.