Movie:
Last Breath
Where: Netflix
About: The documentary is about a near-death experience in commercial diving, focusing on the incredible story of saturation diver Chris Lemons. While performing underwater maintenance work at a depth of over 100 meters (328 feet) on the seafloor of the North Sea, his diving umbilical, which supplies him with breathing gas, warmth, and communication with the diving bell, is accidentally severed. This leaves him with only five minutes of breathable gas in his backup tank and he has no chance of being rescued by his crewmates for more than 30 minutes.
Why: Saturation diving is not for everyone and can be a stressful profession with significant risks. You live in pressurised chambers for weeks, descending to incredible depths to repair oil rigs and pipelines. It’s hard to imagine what saturation diving entails, but through ‘last breath’ you get a feeling of what it’s like and what could go wrong. With a blend of real footage, reenactments, and interviews with Chris Lemons and his colleagues, it feels incredibly authentic and keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Book:
Adventure Mind
About: The book delves into how adventure can profoundly enhance mental health and well-being. Drawing on over twenty years of experience leading expeditions across the globe, Kirk demonstrates how participating in adventurous pursuits can alleviate anxiety, conquer fear, boost self-esteem, and strengthen relationships. It covers a well-being theory called the PERMA model, which identifies five independent components: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishments. Adventure, she poses, supports every single one of them. By actively seeking challenges, choosing to face fear and uncertainty, engaging in adversity and risk, we get to feel really, truly alive.
Why: It’s inspiring that the book’s author is the perfect example of how adventure can change a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and change your life for the better. She explains how adventure changed her from feeling like a victim with low self-esteem to becoming an empowered and confident woman. As a teenager, she felt she wasn’t good enough having suffered physical abuse. The turning point was a hiking and camping school trip when she was sixteen. This made her leave her comfort zone and enter the ‘stretch zone’ where personal growth happens. At eighteen, she went on her first big adventure and joined a yearlong expedition to Tanzania to study wild monkeys. It was at that moment that she learned that putting yourself out there, outside of your comfort zone, is how you get to experience magic.
She claims that predictability and boredom have nowadays replaced uncertainty, so much that we have become unaccustomed to the unknown or unplanned, even fearful of it. Also, rather than protecting us, becoming unaccustomed to dealing with risk makes us less equipped to cope with the inevitable challenges of life.
In summary, this book offers invaluable insights and motivation to embrace adventure as a transformative force and shows us why we should implement it into our own lives. So the question is, how are you going to add more adventure to your life?
To end with a quote from the book: ‘If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it’s lethal’.
Podcast:
Fitness in Diving Podcast
Where: Spotify
About: This episode of ‘Fitness in Diving’ features Dr. Kelly Johnson-Arbor. She is a physician board-certified in Emergency Medicine and Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine. She serves as the Medical Director of the Hyperbaric Medicine program at MedStar Health in Washington, D.C. In this episode, she will share her expertise in treating injured divers in a hyperbaric chamber. The discussion will cover the effects of decompression sickness on divers and the role of hyperbaric oxygen therapy in their recovery.
Why: The overall risk of decompression sickness in recreational diving is estimated to be 1-3 cases per 10,000 dives (0.01–0.03%). The risk increases in technical diving to an estimated 1–10 cases per 1,000 dives (0.1–1%).
Do you know the difference between type I, type II and type III decompression sickness? When you experience symptoms after diving, do you call DAN (Divers Alert Network) or is it better to call the emergency department? What is the benefit of a multiplace hyperbaric chamber when treating decompression sickness? If you do not know the answers to these questions this podcast is worth checking out. Diving is still increasingly popular and your next patient might be a diver. And we all know that proper preparation prevents poor performance.
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