The international coverage of the rescue, which framed Okene as a straightforward survivor and miracle figure, did not capture this dimension of his experience. The story that traveled around the world via social media and wire services was the story of one thing. The experience of being that person, in that society, in the months after the rescue, was a different story.
## The Body in the Chamber
After the rescue from the wreck, Okene was placed in a hyperbaric chamber aboard the support vessel. He spent approximately two and a half days there — approximately sixty hours — before the decompression protocol was complete and he could be brought to normal atmospheric pressure.
The chamber is, physically, a sealed pressurized container, often cylindrical, in which the atmospheric pressure can be controlled precisely. Decompression protocols — the schedules by which pressure is reduced in stages, allowing dissolved gases to exit the bloodstream and tissues without forming dangerous bubbles — are the product of decades of diving medicine research and have been refined through the accumulation of both successful outcomes and tragic ones.
For Okene, who had been breathing compressed air at 30 meters for more than sixty hours, the decompression requirement was significantly beyond what any planned dive would produce. Standard dive tables do not include provisions for the kind of saturation exposure he had experienced, because no recreational or professional diver would knowingly plan for sixty hours of continuous exposure at that depth. The dive team and medical personnel managing his decompression were working in unusual territory.