MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
The agonising 19-day Thai cave search and rescue mission is the subject of a new book by the divers who freed 12 children and their football coach
Before leaving for Thailand on a cavediving mission that saved the lives of 12 trapped children and their football coach, South Australian anaesthetist Richard Harris was considering sedating the boys with fast-acting ketamine.
It was a forgiving drug in terms of dosage, but the risks were impossibly high; only one person Harris knew of in the history of medicine had been anaesthetised underwater and survived.
“I needed a reality check,” Harris writes in new book Against All Odds, which he coauthored with fellow diver and rescuer, Perth vet Craig Challen. “Was that the right drug? Was there something better out there?”
Harris phoned a friend, Kangaroo Island and country SA doctor James Doube, whose experience in the Antarctic and on Macquarie Island had taught him a lot about anaesthetising mammals, including seals.
“James, I want to run something by you,” Harris said by phone. “You’ve done a lot of weird stuff with anaesthesia in strange places.
“What do you think about the idea of giving them some ketamine before diving them out?” Doube gave him an important and reassuring piece of information — that when an anaesthetised seal escaped, it swam with its nose out of water, still breathing comfortably.
“Even when he was underwater, he was still looking out for his own airway,” Doube told Harris. “I think your kids should be fine.”
Even so, the stakes were high, both at home and in Thailand.
As Harris’s wife pointed out, if things went wrong, future patients would be saying to themselves: “I don’t want Dr Harris to anaesthetise me. He’s the one who killed those boys in Thailand.”
On the ground in Thailand, a Foreign Affairs minder gave them a solemn warning that if something went wrong, they could get caught up in the Thai judicial system, sued or even charged with criminal offence.
“This made no sense to me,” Harris writes. “Hadn’t Craig and I volunteered to come to Thailand and help these desperate children? We’d be risking our own lives trying to free them from the cave.”
The minder made it clear that though there were countless volunteers also trying to help,
Harris would be in the firing line.
“’Mainly you’,” Harris writes. “’You’re the doctor, and you’ll be giving the drugs. So if the children die …’ He let the thought taper off there, but I was pretty sure I caught his drift.”
He felt, briefly, like saying that if the Thais had a better idea, they should grab it. “I’ll bow out and let some other idiot swim in there,” he thought.
Then he calmed down and shrugged. He and Challen were exhausted, and the next day they faced their first encounter with the dark and difficult cave from which all 12 boys and their coach would safely emerge.
As Against All Odds hits bookshelves, it coincides with the reopening of the Thai cave where the rescue unfolded.
AAP has reported that at least 2000 visitors queued to get access to the Tham Luang cave. Only 20 people at a time were admitted to the cave entrance and first chamber of the cave complex.
The rescue gained worldwide attention through many dramatic twists, from finding all members safe and sound after more than a week without food, to the death of a rescuer, and finally a safe rescue by diving through high floodwaters.
Richard Harris and Craig Challen were named joint Australians of the Year for their work in helping save the boys.
Against All Odds,