THE BIG SQUEAL

It was lunch time, and sandwiches had been made. One of the lady divers, Suzanne Grubbs, offered me a sandwich. I was at the bow of the boat and started walking back to the cabin. The cabin top was low and had a rectangular window with a cracked pane of glass. Somehow part of the cracked pane had leaned out into the boat walkway. As I walked to get my sandwich, I walked right into the low piece of broken glass. I had a deep severe gash to the outside of my mid-left calf. In a split second, I saw my diving vacation end after a couple dives on the second day of diving.

I could hear all my students telling me the first steps of first-aid that I had taught them. Stop the bleeding; elevate the wound; treat for shock. They wrapped my leg in a towel, elevated it, and had me lay down on top of the ship's cabin. One diver may have applied direct pressure to the towel. Haul anchor and full speed back to the main pier. However, union boats traveled pretty slow.

A decision was made to stop at Hotel El Presidente's dock. This was the southern-most hotel and the first that we would come to. When we reached there, one of our divers went out to the main highway and waited for a car to come by.  He flagged down this Volkswagen beetle and asked the driver to take me to the hospital. The driver agreed and two divers, one of which was Wayne Poorman, got me between them and carried me like a football player off field. My leg had not bled much up until the time I stood up. That first aid stuff really does work!

I was put in the back floorboard of the beetle. I still had my wetsuit top on. I placed my injured leg up to the ceiling of the car and placed my foot against the inside roof. Wayne sat in the front seat and off we went. Thank goodness Wayne could speak Spanish. I think the driver was a tourist. Wayne asked where the hospital was once we got to town.

I slithered out of the beetle and hopped inside the small clinic with Wayne's help. Fortunately no other patients were there and I was hauled upon the operating table. From the ocean bottom, to the beetle floorboard, to the operating table; what a perspective for a morning's worth of vacation? Laying there, I could see blood spatters on the operating lights and then I gazed upon various instruments of medical torture sitting in big glass jars of orange liquid. The nurses preceded to give me a shot of pain killer in my wound. Then came the brush and disinfectant to the wound. At this point I began playing the role of a big tuna caught on a hook and started flipping around on the table. This invoked the nurses to start chattering in Spanish. I was not sure medically what this was going to mean, so I asked Wayne, "What are they saying?". Wayne smiled and said, "The big ones always squeal the loudest!". Well, I certainly was proud that I was doing a good job of representing "the big ones". Eventually a large number of black Frankenstein type of stitches were given me, plus medicine to take.

Just to make sure my vacation was ruined, Wayne asked the doctor when the stitches needed to come out and how long did I need to stay out of the water. He was told him to have me go to the doctor in about a week and a half and have the stitches taken out. The doctor said I could go back to diving in a couple of days. I asked Wayne to reconfirm this. He did and the answer was the same. Yeeee-Haaa! My trip was not going to be totally ruined. ( Big Mistake, Big One! )

After being holed up in my room for a couple of days, I was back on the dive boat for Thursday and Friday. Saturday we would leave to start our trip back. The diving went fine. However, I sometimes saw a fine plume of blood oozing from my leg as I swam about. I prayed that the sharks would not zero in on me. Anyway, the Big One got his diving in and I convinced the boat union not to charge me for a couple days of diving because of their negligence in boat maintenance..

Back to class the next Monday. I even had a type of Frankenstein type of leg-dragging shuffle. My leg itched a little around the wound and was red. Sunburn, no doubt. Yeah, right, you big dummy! Wednesday, down to the University of Texas Health Center to see Dr. Green and have my stitches out. He took one look at my leg and told me that it was infected! He cut all but two of the stitches out to let the wound drain and put a sterile black tar material on it to have the infection sucked out. In came the nurse with a wheel chair and up to the hospital bed for three days.

I did manage to get a phone call in to let some people know where I was. A few members from the club came to see me. This made my stay pretty nice. Dr. Green dismissed me and had me come to the nurses station every day for a month to have the bandages changed. The nurses would always have this horrified expression when they saw my wound.

Over the next month, I enjoyed Dr. Green's friendly nature as I would have him check my leg periodically. I once asked him what he would he do if he were not a doctor. He wasn't sure at that point in his life but he recounted a story of a friend that graduated with him in medical school and quit the profession and became a wildcat oil driller. He thought it important for everyone to follow their dreams.  I asked him to come up with a list of things to put in a diver's first-aid kit for the club and he did.

He later told me that I had come within a whisker of losing my leg to infection and never go diving with that type of wound again.  All life began in the ocean and all the organism in the world are still in it, good and bad.  After all was said and done, the Big One's diving accident had a happy ending, and he had learned that the standards of medical care in other parts of the world do not measure up to what we have in the States.

On a very sad note, sometime within the year, I read in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of the University of Texas, that Dr. Green had shot himself in the heart.  I believe it may have mentioned something about financial troubles. When I see the scar on my leg, like Dr. Green's description of the ocean, there are good memories and there are bad ones and the importance of following one's dreams.

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