Scuba Diving Changes Life of Woman With Terminal Illness The Dodo
Transcript
00:00 As soon as the doctors would give me the bad news, my first question every time was,
00:04 "Will I still be able to dive? How soon can I get back in the water?"
00:08 I've done about 750+ dives at this stage.
00:14 For me, a bad minute underwater beats a good year on land.
00:19 A lot of people say, "Well, it's another world down there,"
00:24 but really it's our world from a different angle,
00:27 and we have a greater connection with it than we realise.
00:30 Sometimes it would be 10 months or 7 months out of the water,
00:39 but when I was finally told that they couldn't cure me after all the surgeries,
00:43 I would go away on dive trips.
00:45 So I'd go and cross manta rays off my bucket list,
00:49 or I'd cross diving with great white sharks off my bucket list,
00:52 and then I'd come back to my next radiotherapy sessions and tell all the medical staff,
00:56 the adventure that I'd been on.
00:58 When I'm down there, I can't have a single thought about this other world up here.
01:07 For me, the ocean has been really therapeutic as well,
01:10 and I spend every possible minute under there.
01:13 I didn't grow up around water,
01:17 and I came to diving a lot later in life than I would have liked to retrospect.
01:23 [Music]
01:30 One year, I saw a million crabs.
01:32 They basically join these little moving on-the-mark groups.
01:37 These massive crabs, with their safety in numbers,
01:41 start to molt their old shells that they've outgrown.
01:44 This octopus just stared me down,
01:53 and cannonballed me.
01:55 It knew what it was doing,
01:56 and I raised up above it,
01:59 so that it could go straight through where I was,
02:02 and go off on its own.
02:04 That was its very clear message to me,
02:06 that it had been ready for its close-up,
02:09 but show was over, see you later.
02:11 Project Banjo came about because,
02:20 for many years, I had seen these beautiful fiddler rays
02:25 that had been caught, but unwanted by fishermen on the pier.
02:29 They would kill them, and throw them back in like rubbish.
02:32 And it got to the point where I realized,
02:35 I've seen this too many times, if I don't do it, it will.
02:38 I honestly think that dealing with a serious,
02:49 chronic, and in my case, terminal condition,
02:53 is a lot of how you process it mentally.
02:56 For me, it was all just about,
02:58 "Okay, when I'm not in hospital, I'm in the water,
03:01 or I'm dreaming about being in the water."
03:04 (upbeat music)
03:07 (upbeat music)
03:12 (upbeat music)