Case of the Parboiled Diver

At 37, Yoshio Oyama was a skilled veteran in deep-sea diving. For 20 years he had flirted, unscathed, with underwater hazards, of which the deadliest is the invisible "bends"--nitrogen coming out of solution in the blood and forming bubbles that cause excruciating pain or paralysis. A fortnight ago, Veteran Diver Oyama met the bends.

From the dinky little salvage vessel Daiei Maru (a misnomer, for it means Great Prosperity), Oyama plunged into Nagasaki Bay in hopes of salvaging enough scrap iron to make it worth the effort and risk. Four times he went down 192 ft. with nothing untoward. Raised to the Daiei Maru's deck after his fifth, hour-long descent, he collapsed in pain. His shipmates, unversed in medicine but with a well-grounded fear of the bends, slapped Oyama's helmet back on him, stuffed his diving suit with lead weights, and dumped him back over the side--down to 150 ft. --planning a slow decompression.

In three hours they raised him only 60 ft. Then the wind changed and freshened: the Daiei Maru had to seek more sheltered waters. And so began one of the most amazing treatments in the history of medicine. Oyama was hoisted up, the ship moved to calmer waters, and he was promptly dunked again in 72 ft. After twelve hours of sitting there on an iron bar, Oyama signaled frantically to be raised: he was chilled to the marrow and had lost the use of his legs. His shipmates took him ashore, put him in a trough used for boiling seaweed, and lit a fire under him. But the air in his suit inflated with the boiling and he bobbed out. So they took him out of the suit, wrapped him in straw, and poured boiling water over him.

Taken back aboard ship, Oyama was dunked again, but an accident made him shoot to the surface like a balloon. A diver on a passing boat recommended taking Oyama ashore and stretching him out, head down, on a steep slope. This too was done. In the next 60 hours Oyama was alternately parboiled and marinated in the brine of Nagasaki Bay.

By good luck, U.S. Navy radiomen had picked up a message about Oyama's plight. The Navy's headquarters at Yokosuka ordered the nearest submarine rescue ship, the Coucal, to Oyama's aid. The Coucal clipped four hours off her estimated time on a flank-speed, 500-mile run to Nagasaki. It took the sorely tried Oyama aboard, and doctors went with him into the sub's decompression chamber. He spent 38 hours there and breathed a mixture of helium and oxygen to help flush out the nitrogen. At the end, Oyama could stand shakily on one leg, though the other was still paralyzed. Said Oyama: "If I get well I shall go back to diving because it is the only thing I know. But I will only go into shallow water--no more deep diving for me."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.