## The Moment of Surfacing
When Harrison Okene finally reached the deck of the support vessel — after the two and a half days in the decompression chamber, after the chamber was brought to normal pressure and the hatch was opened — he was seeing natural light and breathing natural air for the first time in nearly five days.
He had gone below decks in the Jascon-4 in the early morning hours of May 26. He emerged from the hyperbaric chamber on approximately May 31.
The reunions and the initial aftermath are described in the available reporting in terms that emphasize relief and disbelief. His wife, Akpovona, was waiting. The vessel crew and divers who had managed his decompression were there. An unidentified crew member was heard telling him, in footage from the rescue, “You’re a survivor!”
The physical condition he emerged in was, considering what he had been through, described as good. Normal vital signs. Peeling skin. Severe hunger. He was alive, and his body, while marked by the experience, had not suffered the catastrophic failures that the duration and conditions of his confinement might have produced.
What he knew at the point of surfacing, or had been told in the days of decompression, was that he was the only one. The eleven others were gone. Ten bodies had been recovered. One would not be.
The survivor’s guilt that he has described in subsequent interviews was already forming in the decompression chamber, in the days when his body was slowly being brought back to the pressure of the world’s surface, while his mind was absorbing the information about what the rescue had found.