He lost consciousness at some point during the transfer from the wreck to the diving bell, according to some accounts of the rescue. Whether this was from the physical stress of the extraction, from the effects of the air quality in the pocket after sixty-plus hours, or from some other cause is not clearly established in the available reporting.
When he emerged from the chamber, his body showed the signs of what it had been through: his skin was peeling, a consequence of the sustained exposure to cold water and the effects of the decompression process. He was severely hungry and thirsty. His vital signs, according to reporting, were normal.
“Everything was normal,” Okene told the Guardian. His response to that normality: “I thought, that’s not normal.”
The disjunction he identified — the gap between the physical measurements that said his body was functioning within normal parameters and the subjective sense that nothing about his situation was remotely normal — captures something about the specific strangeness of surviving. The body’s machinery continues regardless of what the person inside it has experienced. The numbers come back within range. The machinery does not record the sixty hours.
## The Footage That Changed the Story
The DCN Diving helmet camera footage was recorded at the time of the rescue: late May 2013. It was not released publicly until approximately six months later, in December 2013. The December release date — rather than immediate release — meant that the story had a second arrival for public attention, distinct from the initial wire-service reports that had covered the rescue in May and June.