Aging and diving – final segment.

This is the last part of my aging and diving. I hope that some of you have been able to see that if you set your mind to dive no matter what happens to you physically you can over come the obstacles to continue diving. My last real obstacle came in 2018. I went on a spearfishing outing with a good friend of mine. We went to the wreck of the Albatross, it was a navy PBY float plane that crash landed off of K tower in the 1960s killing all six crew members in 60 feet of water. The plane still had the ghost of a wing and the nacelles after all the years underwater. It really is not a bad dive once you look into the history of the crash.
We had finished the dives and were getting ready to pull anchor when a rogue wave hit us as I was getting my gear put away. I didn’t realize there was a fishing pole on the deck. I had my booties off and my left foot fell hard on the eye at the tip of the rod. When I looked I noticed a red place just bellow my little toe but it did not break the skin so I felt very fortunate at that point. When I got home I immediately had my wife look at it but by that time it was barely noticeable and we didn’t think anything more about it. A month goes by and when I got home from work in the afternoon I stepped into the shower to get cleaned up. When I was drying myself I looked down to dry my feet and that’s when I noticed a blood blister the size of a half dollar and going down to the bottom of my left foot just under my little toe.
I called into work and told them I had to go get it looked at. My doctor sent me to the wound clinic at TMH and that’s where the adventure started. After they X-rayed my foot they found a fracture of my metatarsal bone bellow my little toe. They notified a vascular surgeon just in case they could not get the infection under control. You can guess what happened next, I was admitted to the hospital and was there for five amputation surgeries for five weeks – the last one was the biggest one that basically removed most of my foot in front of the ankle. If that didn’t work they would amputate my leg bellow the knee. It worked and they even folded enough flesh so I could still hold a fin on barely. It seems that MRSA had gotten in there and was quickly eating my foot away.
I was off my feet for 9 months and then I had to use a knee cart for another three months. It finally healed enough for me to learn how to walk again. That late spring I went to Morrison Springs with my family and took my first dive in a year. I was almost in tears it felt so good to be back in the water again. It took several months of walking and climbing stairs to get the strength back into my legs. When I took my first ocean dive off the boat it took me a few minutes to climb the ladder with all my equipment on but I did it. So now as I look back on the last 10 years I have to consider how blessed I am that the physical obstacles were such that it made me thankful to be able to work through them. I am almost 70 years old and I’m still teaching scuba and diving on a regular basis. I hope this will encourage you to keep going no matter if it’s diving or anything that gives you the potion of life.
God made a very intricate organism called the human body. You only get one so try to take care of it.
Keep making bubbles.

Russell Miller #59999