Scuba Diving Becomes a Sublime Experience for the Disabled

Tracy Schmitt, a quadruple amputee and accomplished sailor, skier and mountaineer spent years trying to convince dive instructors to take her on as a client. Tracy said, “They couldn’t imagine: no legs and no left arm, and my right arm is unique with one finger – how would I do it?”

Once she found an instructor, she excelled in the pursuit and is now “an advanced scuba diver approaching my one-hundredth dive,” she said. “The whole world goes silent and your worries just drift away,” she said, adding that “It was the first time I felt like myself again.”

Cody Unser, who developed transverse myelitis (TM), a rare autoimmune condition that left her paralyzed from the waist down at age 12, was introduced to scuba diving by her brother. She experienced an increase in lower-limb sensation while underwater, and took that to her doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Interested in researching this phenomenon more, a team of researchers and a group of veterans with spinal cord injuries traveled to the Cayman Islands for a scuba-diving trip in 2011. According to the news release from Johns Hopkins, the participants had “significant improvement in muscle movement, increased sensitivity to light touch and pinprick on the legs, and large reductions in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms.”

To learn more about the exciting power of Scuba diving, and initiatives to make it more accessible to disabled people, read the article in Stars and Stripes.