Warning Vent Ahead:

Today I had to block someone from my Facebook page, it is of no consequence who they were because they did not have my best interest or the interest of those I love in their minds and their intent in their comments was to be hurtful and I don’t have room or energy for people like that in my life.

Ellie and I after I was released from ICU
- with Septic infection in my bloodstream.

There is no doubt I live with a very serious medical condition.  I have more medical records and test results from the past 15 years that most people accumulate over their entire lives.  My condition is real, proven and something I strive to live with in a positive way.  There is no way to fake blood tests, Sepsis is pretty straightforward life threatening infection and hospitals don’t let you hang out in them for fun. When I am in ICU it is for a reason. That IV line that connects to my body every month is real and I don’t pull that IV pump around for giggles and grins, it saves my life. I would not wish the level of pain and anguish I have lived through with my medical treatments and condition on any other person.  My condition is terminal and I will go through an eventual decline that will continue to limit my abilities to do things and that is my reality and it sucks but I know that it will come and that is why every day for me is precious.  Every day I awake to see my handsome talented husband, and our beautiful service dogs is a glorious day. 

Ellie and I getting another week of infusion treatment

 

Ellie and I post op - following the surgery to get my central port.

Some years ago I decided to be open and honest about my medical condition, I blog and write about it in great detail sharing experiences of hospital stays and pictures of intense treatments. I share this to help people understand what we as a family live with and to help others know that even when things seem bleak there is always something positive to hang on to in the darkest hour.  Pain in my life is a constant and it does effect my ability to do some things and it does wear on my emotions but it does not rule me.  Pain ebbs and flows, up and down, back and forth and I float along in it like the waves of the ocean. Some days the waves crash and pound my body against the rocks and other mornings I float along smooth as glass.  But the pain level is not what is important ever. What is important is kissing my husband good morning, holding his hand when mine is trembling, feeling his hand on my back when I cannot sit up, the softness of Ellie’s fur in my fingers and the love in her big brown eyes when she lays her head in my lap.  Those simple acts of love matter more that anything else and that is what is held on to during the pain. Pain is an electric impulse through a nerve bundle and it has no malice for me it just is part of what makes me a stronger person.

My Portable IV pump - it fits inside
my R2D2 rolling bag

My IV line attached to my central port and
connected to my portable pump inside R2D2.

So when some one asks me, “how can my husband and I travel to places and scuba dive if I am disabled?” I get livid.  Disabled people do all manner of things.  Scuba just happens to be what is sacred to us and it is so because when we are under the water we feel strong and whole in our bodies the way we used to before our illness and injuries.  I dive because it makes me feel normal for 1 hour at a time.  It is same reason Wounded Warriors and other Non-Profit organizations help disabled people learn to dive so they can feel that sense of freedom again with their bodies.  I am blessed to know disabled people who win buckles in national Rodeos; I am honored to know disabled people who race cars, run the rapids in kayaks and sky dive.  The difference when a disabled person does some adrenaline type sport it takes more planning and modifications of the equipment.  But life for a disabled person takes more planning and modification. That planning and modification does not make what the person is doing any less spectacular or the person less competent, frankly it usually highlights how remarkable the spirit and strength of heart that person possesses.

Isla Mujeres - Cliff of the Dawn - and one of the most
beautiful and healing places for me.

So when someone implies I should not be celebrating the 5^th anniversary with my loving husband in a tropical island where we can go scuba diving because I am disabled – I tell them to go pound sand and block them from my page.  We save and scrape our pennies all year to make that trip and we are not going to expensive places; we go there because it is mystical and magical and filled with other people we love. Our family dinner downtown on the island, I had my favorite thing Lima soup for 60 pesos or 3.29 USD.  Our hotel room cost less on the island with every meal and drink included than a Best Western room costs here with nothing included not even a bottle of water.  Again, we go to that island because it is not about the money – it is about the wonderful people there whom we have worked with for years and who care for us like family.

We dive because it makes us feel whole - and we are lucky to
have made friends with great dive masters who understand
how to accommodate our conditions so we can dive safely.

My husband knows more than anyone else how many times a doctor has expressed how little time I have left, or how awful the later parts of my decline will be.  My husband more than anyone else understands that I have surpassed my medical expiration date 5 times and I have coded and come back 3 times.  My husband has been the one pounding on my chest breaking my ribs to get my body to breathe again, and he has held my hand when there was non one there but the sound of beeps from the machines.  I will go back to that tiny little island every year to celebrate our love until there is no way to do it.  I will grab my IV pole and roll it onto the plane and through the airport and on that damn ferry until I can no longer.  Because there will come a day went I can no longer make that trip and will only have the pictures and the memories.  I will not apologize for living what is left of my life to the fullest and for spending each day with a smile on my face and making great new memories in my heart. 

We are as goofy underwater as we are on land -
Life is short, so we fill it with laughter.

 My husband is a damn honorable, talented and huge hearted man.  He spends his life giving back to others, helping others to give thanks for how he himself was helped. I have seen him go do this work with his hands trembling from pain and come home in total agony, but again it is not the pain that matters. What matters are the people, who he connects with, who he can help on some level and who through helping them heal his own soul.  I try and help whenever I can and I will until my dying day. Because that is who we are, it is no trick or game; it is who we are and what makes us happy. We are blessed to have found and be a part of similarly thinking people who get it in their bones that in helping others you refuel your spirit and heal your soul.

Another view of the waves at the Cliff of the Dawn -
To the Mayans this was a sacred island where you
came to heal . . . I kinda agree with them.

So I blocked the idiot – removed and deleted any and all nasty posts he said to me, because the time I got left will be spent positively, in service to my community and in making this place better than I found it in any way I can for as long as I can. As I see it there have been multiple changes for me to have been ‘called home’ and each time I awake and come back so someone in high places still has work for me to do and I will keep doing it until I am done.

For those who don’t like it – don’t let the door hit ya on the way out.

 

Jeff and I, exhausted after a dive.  Yes it is hard for us to do it but the memories
are worth it. I can tell you when I have those weeks ing the hospital and things
are real tough, these are the pictures and memories I hang on to, and fight
so we can go back there and make more memories.

The white sands of North Beach on Isla Mujeres - with some of our greatest joys and passions, the work Jeff does with Operation Freedom Paws, paw prints for our service dogs, and the Rolleflex camera and the love we share around all of it.

Diving heals the soul and helps me feel whole again, even if just for 40 minutes . . .

We just experienced two of the most spectacular cavern dives of our lives.  We always Dive with Alfredo Duarte from Luum Ha Diving for cavern/cenote dives because they are exceptionally good dive masters and instructors and their professionalism and knowledge about the cave systems in Mexico are top notch.  Here is the link to their Face book site: https://www.facebook.com/LuumHaDiver  

We have been diving with Alfredo from Luum Ha for 5 years and experienced many cenote dives but our trip to The Pit and The Pet Cemetery were by far some of the most challenging and most beautiful we have done. 

This is a map of the whole system here - we only dove the area called the pit - it is the small squarish part in the upper right of the map -so you can see how much we did not see.

The Pit is part of the Dos Ojos cave system. Exploration of Dos Ojos began in 1987 and still continues. The surveyed extent of the cave system is 82 kilometers (51 mi) and there are 28 known sinkhole entrances, which are locally called cenotes.  Dos Ojos is one of the top three longest underwater cave systems in the world. Dos Ojos contains the deepest known cave passage in Quintana Roo with 119.1 meters (391 ft) of depth located at "The Pit" discovered in 1996 by cave explorers who came all the way from the main entrance some 1,500 meters (4,900 ft) away.  In fact the Pit is where Carlos Coste set the free diving record of 150 mt (490ft) on one breath, back in November of 2010. 

We dove in The Pit. There is a long stairway down to a small wooden platform.  This stairway is relatively new – only a few short years ago you would free jump into the water and lover your gear by rope.  Jeff and I have great difficulty with stairs, and Alfredo and the Luum Ha team are excellent with helping us with our disabilities.  They like us believe diving can be done safely for people with some disabilities and without their assistance in loading our gear down to the water we would never be able to see the beautiful places.  We gear up in the water to take the weight off Jeff’s back and my abdomen.  This is a fairly common practice of divers with our disabilities.  The reason we love diving is that once in the water; we can feel like we have the same strength and agility we had before our injuries.  Diving allows us a feeling of physical freedom from pain, and a quieting of the mind we never have outside the water.  We are lucky to have dive master in Mexico, who understands that diving is healing for the soul and body and is willing to have his team assist us in getting into the water so we can experience these amazing places.

Once in the Pit, you descend to about 120ft – the water is fresh and clear as you are descending and around 95ft you start to see the Halocline, which is much wider here than in other caves.  The halocline is where the fresh water mixes with the salt water. Salt water is denser than fresh water so when gravity forces them to mix inside the cave the water stratifies; forming layers which creating very interesting visual effects.  Most cave systems this halocline is just a few feet of layers mixing, but because of the size and depth of The Pit, the halocline goes on for many more feet creating this incredible white cloud.  As you descend into and out of the cloud there are old braches of trees reaching out of the cloud.  And it looked as if we were ascending from Mordor as we came up.  Here is a short video of El Pit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggIb4R3QtOw We are editing our video and will post it soon, but here isa fun on to give you an idea in the mean time

The formations in the large room near the entrance to the pit 

The limestone formations in the Pit are breath taking. The death of the caves means they are huge.  During the Ice Age the ocean lowered by about 350ft and this whole cave system was above the water line for hundreds of years. During this dry period humans and animals used the caves for shelter and tress and plants took root.  So the caves are filled with fossils of human and animal skeletons.  They have found a female skeleton, in a fetal position as for burial, and dated her to 12,000 years old.  The Pit has a full skeleton of a giant sloth, which is at least 8000 years old and many other bones.  All of the formations of stalagmites and stalactites in the Pit are exceptional, some are hundreds of feet tall reaching all the way down the wall and then there are the shelves with thousands of tiny needle like formations tucked into the side of the cave.  The main shaft of the cave has several tunnels branching off into other chambers. We stayed inside the main area as it took almost an hour to just explore all the incredible formations along the wall as we were ascending back slowly to the surface.  It was a beautiful slow exploration of some of the coolest formations we have seen: there was a section where is looked as if some one had melted butter and maple syrup down the side in big globs for fifty sixty feet. 

After the Pit, the tram graciously carried all of our gear to the surface as we slowly hauled our bodies back up to the van.  We always joke that it takes days for us to recover from the toll it takes on our physical bodies but the joy it gives our souls is beyond measure.  Personally I never feel more ‘alive’ than when I am diving.  Back at the van the team loaded up the gear and we had a nice lunch break before heading to the next dive at the Pet Cemetery.  

The Ladder down into to big open chamber . . . there was no possible way Jeff or I could go there so the younger couple divng with us took my phone and grabbed pictures of the inside for us.  we stood at the top and heard all the "oooohhhhs and aaaaaaahhhhs" and we very jealous.

Meet Heath and Bobbi Allen - they were the second dive team on the trip and they were both great divers and very sweet to help us take pictures in the places where Jeff and I could not walk to on land.  

 This is the large chamber at the bottom of this ladder that looked like it went down forever.

The Pet Cemetery cenote is a shallow dive with max depth of about 25 ft but most of the dive is actually around 10ft.  even though this is a shallow dive in extremely clear fresh water, don’t let that fool you into thinking this is a easy dive.  The whole path is surrounded by very fragile formation, beautiful formations which make you feel like you are gliding through a crystal palace.  This is a difficult dive because the area is tight, the formations are all very close to you and you must have excellent buoyancy control not to tough the formations or the floor.  

The floor is covered in fine silt and one tap of fin or hard kick and you will fill the whole tunnel with a giant silt cloud.  So you streamline and frog kick very lightly and keep yourself from toughing anything.  This is one of the most challenging buoyancy dives we have ever made. Gliding along in and around those formations made me feel like I was flying. 

Here is a short video of the Pet Cemetery Dive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj9U1U_5JpY

We shot our own video and are working on editing it but I thought you might enjoy these videos in the mean time.

This is the small wooden platform at the entry of the Pet Cemetery, this is shallow and ha heavy silt - so the team packed our gear here for us and we very carefully dressed in the water. Dressing in the water allows me to suit up without causing a huge amount of pain to my abdominal muscles.  I wear a full 5m suit and an abdominal binder to try and lesson that pain during the dive but dressing in the water is a huge help and the only reason I can do dives like this. Diving is an adrenaline sport, but it can be done safely for people with all kinds of disabilities and the more dive masters understand the type of assistance the diver needs the more the can help more people experience the wonder of being under the water.  

The overhead environment is close all around you, you are swimming very close to fragile formations that are thousands and thousands of years old and the floor is a instant cloud of blinding silt.  You touch the floor and you fill the clear water with a silt cloud and if you hit the wall or ceiling you are damaging history. So you get your buoyancy right and start gliding along with great care. This is what I meant by a very challenging dive.

The Pet Cemetery gets it’s name from all of the skeletons found on the floor of the system, where animals wandered in to die thousands of years ago back before the water rose inside the cave.  You can clearly see one full skeleton and several pieces of a huge jawbone plus many other bones. It is a rather exciting history lesson to know the how and why of these amazingly beautiful structures we are now blessed to experience.  There is something quite humbling in those limestone structures, something almost awe inspiring when you realize the millions of years it took to form, the synchronicity of the ice age dropping ocean levels and allowing life to flourish inside the cave and then finally the slow rise of the ocean back to modern levels. All of that had to happen, in that order over that time to allow us to behold the beauty now.  To know that those caves have only been being explored by a very small number of people since the late 1980’s makes me feel very lucky indeed to have experienced them and hold them as part of my soul.

The formations are incredible - he is an example of how the stalagmites and stalactites grow together over time to form columns - now image those columns standing 100's of feet high in the deeper caves.

 All of the bones were in the cave before the water started to rise again so that means they are all at least 8000 years old.  those are some pretty good looking 8000 year old teeth, huh?

Large jaw bone with all the teeth still intact and a partial skeleton of a deer below.

There is now a beautiful new museum on the Dos Ojos site: The Institute of Pre- History of the Americas, that has great exhibits about the ice age and how the fossils came to be all through out the cave system. Here is their Facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Instituto-de-la-Prehistoria-de-América/155086507853455

If you go to Dos Ojos now – stop at the museum.  The museum building also serves as a meetinghouse for the local Mayan community – a gathering place where they can come together and work with the government researchers.  The cave system is on Mayan land and has been part of their history and culture from the beginning so it is wonderful to see the cooperation between the local people and the researchers.  These caves have only been explored since the late 1980’s and there is so much more yet to find.  The museum will soon house a onsite lab where researchers will be working on fossil finds and the public will be allowed to watch how fossils are brought up from the water and then preserved, tested and replicas are returned to their exact locations. This is a one of kind collaboration with the local Mayan population working to preserve the rich history of this land and the peple and animals who have been inhabiting it for thousands of years.

This is a reproduction of the site where the skeleton of the female's skeleton pictured above - the bones are arranged in a fetal position as if she had been wrapped for burial. the bones were placed before the water rose and that is why they stayed so close together, the skull had an air pocket inside and as the water rose it lifted and turned allow the air to escape and that is why is rolled off to the side slightly when it return to the silt after the water rose above the bones.  To date they have found the oldest fully intact skeleton in the new world - a woman they named Naia and then have found another young man dated about 10,000 years old here in the cave system.  This cave system is one of the third largest in the world and still not fully explored so it is exciting to imagine how many more finds there could be in the waters down there.

They did a reconstruction on the skeleton face and determined this is what she would have looked like. She was around 45 years of age but because of the difficulty of her life she would have appeared much older by our modern standards. these people all used their teeth as their main tools, so their skulls and jaw bones and teeth show a lot of wear and infection.

 Diving for both Jeff and I deeply important to us; not just because we are both disabled with medical conditions which can make life outside the water difficult, but because of how being under the water in the full glory of nature can heal our souls.  I spend a lot of time in and out of hospitals and on Picc lines having having blood transfusions and other medical treatments which make life not so much fun.  so When I am free from those treatment even just for a month or two we try and get underwater again. We run off to feel the ocean around us, see the incredible formations in the cenotes and be with all of the abundant like on the reefs.  Those few precious moments under the water refuel our souls, and even though it may take our bodies a while to recover every second we get under the big blue is worth every moment of recovery outside.  I know my diving days are limited as my condition progresses, but until then, I will fight like hell to keep getting back there.

This is why we are working to help other disabled veterans and civilians learn to dive. SCUBA, and being in the water allows us to feel whole again and move with the agility we had before our injuries or illnesses.  Sharing the gift of diving with other disabled veterans is a life long dream so they too can feel whole again in the big blue.