Australian of the Year: Bravery of ‘selfless, dedicated’ Thai...

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    Australian of the Year: Bravery of ‘selfless, dedicated’ Thai cave rescuers earns joint honour

    Craig Challen and Richard Harris after the cave rescues.Craig Challen and Richard Harris after the cave rescues.

    When they told Richard Harris the plan was to strap the boys into scuba gear, drug them unconscious and drag them one by one through a warren of submerged caves to freedom, he shook his head and said: “Don’t do it.”

    He eventually went along with the plan because there was no other way to save the 12 Thai teenagers and their soccer coach. He feared from the moment the rescue began to when it ended three nailbiting days later that some or even all of them would die.

    Their survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds was a tribute not only to the efforts of the Adelaide anaesthetist, fellow cave diver Craig Challen and the hundreds of volunteers who joined the international rescue mission in northern Thailand, but also to the resilience and never-say-die attitude of the trapped boys.

     EDITORIAL: From the depths, a glint of hope

    Dr Harris would like to see more of that kind of grit in Australian children.

    “I’ve really been inspired by these kids,” he said on being named this newspaper’s joint Australian of the Year with Dr Challen.

    “I’ve lived a life full of adventure and I don’t shy away from some minor risk-taking activity.

    “I think such activities are really important in growing people and making them more robust and ready to take on the inevitable challenges in life.”

    If there was a good news story of 2018, this was it. With the whole world holding a collective breath, the difficult and dangerous extraction went off without a hitch.

    Dr Harris and Dr Challen, a retired Perth vet, held the threads together, managing the treatment and care of the comatose boys while they were swum or carried through treacherous flooded passageways in the inky darkness, hundreds of metres below ground.

    A chuffed Dr Harris, 54, said yesterday: “We are just a couple of ordinary guys who got involved in something very special. Aside from the outcome, it just seems to have brought pleasure to so many.

    “The fact that it was an international rescue, with people from different places and backgrounds involved, it just shows that mankind can do the right thing if we set our minds to it.”

    The rescued boys of the Wild Boars soccer team. Picture: EPAThe rescued boys of the Wild Boars soccer team. Picture: EPA

    Dr Challen, 53, still marvels that everyone lived to tell this astonishing tale. “Anaesthetising people and then putting their heads under water is just not something you would do,” Dr Challen explained. “If you asked us beforehand, we would have said that it is impossible. Clearly, events proved that not to be correct. But it is definitely not something that we would take lightly if we had to do it again, even now.”

    The Australian's editor-in-chief, Christopher Dore, said the newspaper’s joint Australians of the Year represented all that was good about this country and human nature. “They are brave. Selfless. Dedicated. Brilliant. Humble. They show the rest of us what can be achieved, even in the most unforeseen circumstances. By calmly confronting fear and adversity, they, along with many other brave souls who took part in this remarkable rescue, triumphed,” Dore said.

    “Dr Harris and Dr Challen typify the Australian spirit and inspire us all not only to push the limits of achievement but also simply to be better. They are truly worthy recipients of this great honour.”

    The pair met 12 years ago while diving a sinkhole in the West Australian outback and became fast friends as well as a very special thing in the international caving fraternity: expert divers who were medically qualified.

    After the boys from the Wild Boars soccer team were found on July 2 last year, nine days after going missing in the Tham Luang cave system near the resort town of Chang Rai, the ranking British cave diver at the scene, Rick Stanton, reached out to the Australians.

    By then, it was evident the only way to free the boys and 25-year-old coach, Ekkapol “Ek” Chantawong, was to bring them out the way they had come in.

    Attempts to find an alternative route to the surface through the limestone labyrinth had failed; so had pumping the caves dry. Waiting it out until the water subsided was no longer an option because the flood was rising, fed by monsoonal rain.

    The rescuers had considered teaching the Wild Boars to scuba dive, but this was another non-starter. The kids were certain to panic underwater in the blackness, endangering themselves as well as their rescuers. When the option of sedating them was raised with Dr Harris, he was adamant: “I said, absolutely not. It would almost certainly lead to the death of the kids.”

    But he told Mr Stanton he was happy to fly to Thailand to do what he could. Dr Challen had to come — they were a team, dive buddies who had been in countless tight corners together. Soon after they arrived, late on July 6, the die was cast: the boys would have to be drugged.

    Next afternoon, they ventured into the cave system, a hive of activity as preparations for the extraction went into overdrive. Dr Harris assessed the boys’ medical condition: it was surprisingly good considering the cold and damp conditions, though they were painfully thin. He asked Pak, the Thai military doctor on the scene in chamber nine, where the Wild Boars had found refuge on a ledge, to pick the strongest youngster to go first. In the end, Coach Ek made the decision: it would be a 14-year-old named Note.

    Outside, Mr Stanton was finetuning the gear the divers would use to shepherd the boys to safety, testing the wetsuits and harness rigs on local children in a swimming pool. Six boys were to come out the next day — depending, of course, on whether Note made it through the opening run.

    Dr Harris was still deeply pessimistic as he turned over in his mind what could go wrong. If the facemask leaked, the child would drown; if he got the anaesthetic dose wrong, the child would die; hypothermia or unforeseen obstructions could reach and kill at any point. “In zero visibility, underwater, with lay people in attendance, I just couldn’t conceive it would work,” he said. But as Dr Challen points out, there “was no way we would have undertaken it unless we had no choice”.

    By noon on July 7, everyone was in position. Dr Harris had swum back to chamber nine to be with the boys while Dr Challen was waiting with his medical kit at the first stop, chamber eight. The boys, after being anaesthetised, would be pulled along by the rescue diver. At times they would have to be “parked” so the diver could go on ahead and drag them through a choke point, underlining the need for them to be knocked out.

    “Imagine being left alone in zero visibility, not knowing when the diver would return,” Dr Harris said. “You could fill me up with as much Valium as you like, I would still be freaking out.”

    Dressed in his wetsuit, Note swallowed a tablet of alprazolam, a Valium-like sedative, and sat on Dr Harris’s lap to be injected with the field anaesthetic, ketamine. He was then put into the rest of his diving gear: a buoyancy vest, the modified harness with a handle on the back for the rescue diver to grip and an oxygen tank strapped to his belly. The air was turned on and the facemask fitted with the all-important silicon seal.

    The boy’s hands were also loosely bound by plastic ties, not as a restraint, but to prevent his arms from being snagged underwater. A nervous Dr Harris jumped the gun in anaesthetising the second boy — “I got a bit overexcited” — as diver Jason Mallinson set off with a now-unconscious Note in tow. Dr Challen, waiting at the other end in chamber eight, would send back word on the boy’s fate.

    The tension was raw by the time they surfaced. “I can still remember quite clearly when that first boy came through, and realising there were bubbles and he was breathing,” Dr Challen recalled. There was still a long way to go, a mountain of work to do, of course. “But a bit of weight was lifted from our shoulders.”

    Dr Challen administered a top-up dose of ketamine to Note, who was showing signs of coming round, and sent him on his way with the next diver, part of a relay that stretched 3.2km to the cave entrance. The rest is history. Three other boys safely came out that day (two short of the target), followed by the rest of their teammates over the succeeding 48 hours of the rescue.

    As the world rejoiced, Dr Harris and Dr Challen were feted as heroes. In addition to today’s honour from this newspaper, they have been named South Australian and West Australian of the Year respectively, and are in the running for the National Australia Day Council’s Australian of the Year award to be announced next Friday by Scott Morrison.

    Both men have been thinking about what they would like to do with this new-found platform.

    For Dr Harris, it’s the message to helicopter parents that it’s all right for kids to take “sensible risks” and “get out and explore the outdoors, earn a few grazes and stubbed toes that come from getting amongst it”.

    He said: “So I would really like to encourage parents and kids to get out and get back to camping and boating and all the stuff that I grew up with, which I think stood me in good stead for life later on. I think all kids have got the inner explorer that they have to find for themselves.”

    Dr Challen hopes a more positive Australia can make the most of this country’s “extraordinary” opportunity, not squander it through negativity. “Not everyone is going to do something famous like this,” he said of the cave rescue. “Harry and I are just two ordinary blokes who have enjoyed the advantages this country has to offer and benefited greatly from it. And, you know, we got the chance to participate in this very special event.”

    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/australian-of-the-year-bravery-of-selfless-dedicated-thai-cave-rescuers-earns-joint-honour/news-story/81fe6f0e68709fb1afd27e27c2cd2251?utm_source=The%20Australian&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=BreakingNews

 
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