Whether he has had the opportunity to use his training in an actual rescue scenario is not established in the available reporting. His current work in offshore oil and gas — installing, building, and repairing subsea infrastructure — is commercial diving work rather than emergency rescue work, but the certification and the aspiration are documented.
His brother initially objected to the decision to train as a diver. The family dynamic here is understandable: a person who has survived a catastrophic maritime accident decides to pursue a career that will put him regularly at the bottom of the sea. From a family member’s perspective, this may look less like confronting a fear and more like courting the same fate again. Okene’s response to the objection was ultimately to proceed.
## The Marriage, the Nightmares, and What the Rescue Left
One element of the aftermath reporting that deserves careful treatment is the state of Okene’s marriage and his psychological recovery in the years following the rescue. Some early accounts cited his wife Akpovona (27 at the time of the rescue) describing the nightmares and the nightly episodes of confusion about sinking. Later reporting indicated that Okene and his wife had separated by 2015.
The available sources do not establish with clarity the relationship between the post-rescue psychological effects and the marriage separation. The separation is documented; the specific causes, like the specific contents of most marriages and their endings, are not available in public reporting. It would be inappropriate to infer that the PTSD-adjacent symptoms he described — the nightmares, the disorientation — were the primary cause of the separation, or to characterize the separation in any causal terms that the available evidence does not support.