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Channeling the Pain
Don Blackwelder didn't hear his daughter cry out for help. After he surfaced and yanked off his mask, he could only hear Randy screaming in agony. He swam over and was soon joined by Gwen. "The whale hit my leg," Randy told them. "I can't swim." Don raised both of his arms above his head and waved -- the signal for help -- then grabbed Randy by the neck of his suit and ferried him 50 feet to the boat. He was surprised to find Bridgette dragging her mother through the water, aided by her husband and another swimmer."Quick! Let's get her aboard," said Christopher Guglielmo, the crew member who'd taken the group out to the reef. While Randy hung on to the side of the boat, Christopher and Don hauled Janet aboard to check for vitals. "She has a pulse," said Christopher. "She's alive."
Randy wanted to scream every time the yacht bounced over a wave. Captain Van Der Walt had put out a distress call, and an orthopedic surgeon aboard a nearby ship helped stabilize Randy's leg using a dive fin and a steel pole. Fearing that an artery might rupture if Randy was moved to a cabin below, the doctor said he'd have to stay on the deck.
The captain headed back to the Dominican Republic, weaving around coral pinnacles with care as he tried to get back quickly. Morphine shots from the first-aid kit on board helped somewhat, but Randy still felt as if his leg were being rubbed across a bed of nails. "Are we there yet?" he kept asking Gwen, who was lying by his side, rubbing his forehead with a cold compress. He tried to channel the pain into positive thoughts. On the other side of the deck, Janet groaned and opened her eyes. "What happened?" she asked Bridgette. The last thing she remembered was touching the whale calf. "Mom," her daughter replied, "you were kissed by the whale."
In 13 years of taking groups out to snorkel with humpbacks, Van Der Walt had never witnessed anything like the scene on his yacht that afternoon. He knew of not a single injury involving humans and whales in Silver Bank. "If the group hadn't separated in the water, this never would have happened," he says. "They got too close, and the mother whale felt it was time to move on." Still, says the captain, "it was an accident."
More than nine hours later, when the boat tied up at the dock in Puerto Plata, two ambulances were waiting to take Randy and Janet to Bournigal Medical Center. Janet, it was discovered, had suffered a bad concussion, bruises and rib injuries. She would be released from the hospital in a couple of days -- in time to make the flight back home to the States with the rest of the group. Doctors were worried, though, about a possible infection in Randy's leg. "If you don't let us operate," a doctor told him, "you'll die."
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