By CAROLINE STRAINIG
FOR Diane Irving, life will never be quite the same again. For this Port Macquarie woman, just getting up in the morning and looking forward to the new day and the experiences it will bring is a delight.
“I have a new appreciation of life,” Diane says, as she gazes around her garden.
“You don’t realise what you have until you almost lose it. I will never take things for granted again.”
Yes, Diane is a positive person at the best of times, but there is a reason for her new-found appreciation: a near-death experience. And she still to this day does not know who to thank for saving her.
Wind back the clock to Saturday 6 April, a cloudy day with light showers. Diane headed down to Town Beach for her daily swim. No-one else was around, but she knew the lifeguards would be on duty soon. Besides, what could happen? She’d been doing this just about every morning for the past 14 years.
“I put on my goggles and waded out,” Diane says. “The surf wasn’t rough and I was enjoying myself being a dolphin, catching waves. Suddenly, I decided to get onto a wave a little too late. I knew I was in trouble straight away. Then the wave slammed me into the ground head first and I felt my neck pushed to the side.
“I didn’t know which way was up, and I couldn’t move my legs or arms. I knew I had to get my mouth above water, to float, to get a breath.
“I looked towards shore and saw a lifeguard coming on duty. One was on his way up the tower, not looking out to sea, and the other was looking but could not see me. I knew I had to raise my arm, so I tried and tried and finally did. He didn’t see it at first. Then finally it twigged.”
The two lifeguards pulled her out of the water, laid her on a spinal board and put a neck brace on.
Diane was panicking because she could not see. “I moved my hand to my face and it was blood,” she said. “When I hit the bottom my goggles had sliced a deep cut right down my nose to the bone.”
She was taken by ambulance to the trauma unit at the Port Macquarie Base Hospital. The cut on her nose would not stop bleeding and even the doctors were worried.
“I heard one of them say he had to stitch it or I could bleed out,” Diane said.
A plethora of X-rays and tests followed. The next day she was sent home in a neck brace, but a month later after yet another visit to a surgeon had to undergo a major operation at a regional hospital.
“Plates, screws and anything else you can think of has been placed in my spine, fusing vertebrae two to seven,” she said.
Today, many months on, Diane still has restricted movement in her neck, but is back playing her beloved lawn bowls at the Westport Club. Not surprisingly, body-surfing is out forever.
She sent a letter to the surf club to thank the lifeguards who saved her, but still doesn’t know their names and would love to be able to thank them personally if she ever gets the opportunity.
“This story is not about me – it should be about them,” she says.
“I keep thinking where would I have been without the lifeguards and the doctors and nurses at the hospital. If the lifeguards hadn’t been there I would have drowned, and I was told that the slightest bang to my neck and I would have been a quadriplegic.
“I have nothing but praise for every single one of them. Thank-you to all that were involved. You have my heartfelt thanks.”
The ex-body-surfer has one final word of advice for people who like swimming off beaches: “Do it on a patrolled beach, between the flags and when lifeguards are on duty,” she says. “You never know what can happen, regardless of how experienced you are.”
