A week in the life of a DMT

It’s exhausting all this divemastering 😁 honestly the last six days have been a blur. I barely saw my fellow DMTs Kai had his girlfriend here and went conspicuously AWOL and Carolyn had to do a visa run to Singapore. I only know what I’ve been up to as I’ve started making a note at the end of each day. 

It’s been beautiful and warm as usual but with some fairly impressive rainfall, the rainy season was, by all accounts, late and pitiful so any rain is much appreciated by everyone. Cycling along lanes filled with water was a new and not altogether unpleasant experience and the smell of the trees steamy with moisture was a tropical smell sensation. 

Saturday and Sunday passed in a whirlwind of studying and assisting on a PADI Rescue Diver course with perhaps two of the most well prepared students ever. They read the manual and completed the knowledge reviews in record time before knocking the practicals out of the water! A background in teaching swimming and lifeguarding clearly a great start! 

While we took a few days off from that, to wait for the swell to settle and our house reef to become accessible for their final rescue scenarios, I enjoyed two spectacular days of diving on Big Boat. The last all the sweeter because Lizzie, an incredibly lovely instructor who we dove with in Vietnam arrived with her boyfriend, Vlad. Jason joined us on the boat (yippee!) diving with them. I dove with Brett, one of the students on my first Open Water who had returned to Lembongan after some disappointing diving in the Gilis to do his advanced certification with us. The dives were near perfect, warm, crystal clear water, turtles, myriad beautiful fish, a few of my favourite octopus and a very sociable sea snake. It  was so great, seeing Lizzie who had made an otherwise boring dive trip in the overfished Vietnamese waters enjoyable, and meeting Vlad who is awesome.

On Tuesday we returned to shore only for me to be struck by an aura migraine that quickly morphed into a patchy body rash, inexplicable muscle pain and intense itching. Amongst other things these are all possible symptoms of decompression illness (what used to be known as the bends) and the guys were quick to get me hooked up to the emergency oxygen and start making a plan for getting me to the mainland if my synptoms persisted or worsened. As I lay on the bed feeling remarkably sorry for myself Dengue fever was mentioned, I forcefully refused that idea even though it’s quite likely as I’ve probably been bitten more than anyone else on the island (at least I had been, 5 drops of citronella in coconut oil lathered on me every time I leave our bungalow seems to be doing the trick) but I had two new strange reaction sites which were definitely not mosquito bites and I’d more than likely picked up underwater. So having thankfully ruled out DCI we were left with my having suffered a bizarre allergic reaction to something, joy! The bottle of oxygen, two ibuprofen and two benadryl had me feeling much better and a few hours later I was well enough to be sending J out for food. 

Under Doctors orders (Thank you Patricia!) I took the next day as a study day and slept heavily inbetween periods of cramming, leaving the bed for lunch and then a delicious dinner of BBQ pork ribs at Lemongrass with J and Brett, who having planted some fairly hair raising images in my head (he’s a vet and post dinner conversation was of the dog castrating, llama birthing variety) is off on the next leg of his six month adventure.

Also scattered throughout the week were tiny kittens and puppies and breaking up dogfights, amazing sunsets and even more amazing night skies, the Moon, the space station, Mars and Jupiter one night!, washing machine currents and hilarious episodes of Modern Family.  

Today I’m feeling totally ok although yesterday still felt as if I could do with a day or two out of the sea so instead of joining Big Boat I studied some more then began assisting on an Open Water Certification for three super happy and excited teens with Gede, one of the great instructors here. I love an Open Water because being part of someone’s first underwater breaths is pretty unbelievably cool stuff!

Four weeks in and unless I monumentally stuff things up it won’t be long before I am a fully fledged PADI certified divemaster. It’s been the most amazing learning curve and even though my brain may explode, a real reminder of what can happen when you say YES to life Xx