“He came in but he was too fast,” Okene told AP reporters. “So I saw the light but before I could get to him, he was already out. So I tapped him at the back of his neck, so he was afraid.”
The fear in the moment — the diver’s instinctive recoil from an unexpected touch in an environment of death — is part of the story. So is what happened after the fear: the recognition that the touch was alive, the grasp of the hand, the transmission back to the surface that the situation had changed from recovery to rescue.
## Preparing for the Ascent
The rescue of Harrison Okene was not, at the point of discovery, complete. It had barely begun in the dimension that mattered most for his survival over the next two days: managing the enormous amount of nitrogen that his body had absorbed during sixty-plus hours of breathing compressed air at 30 meters depth.
The physics of nitrogen absorption is one of the fundamental realities of diving medicine. At elevated pressure, the nitrogen in air dissolves into body tissues at a higher rate than it does at the surface. This is not immediately harmful — nitrogen is largely inert in the body, unlike carbon dioxide or oxygen at dangerous concentrations — but it creates a delayed hazard. When pressure decreases rapidly, as it would during an ascent to the surface, the dissolved nitrogen can come out of solution and form bubbles in the blood and tissues. These bubbles cause the condition known as decompression sickness, commonly called “the bends” — a potentially fatal condition that can cause paralysis, stroke-like neurological damage, joint pain, and death, depending on where the bubbles form.