Diver’s lucky speargun escape
Connie is lucky to be alive after shooting himself through the face with his speargun in a freak underwater accident
HE FELT the heavy weight of a wave crashing over him. The sea was rough but Connie Hallowell wasn’t scared – it was just another ordinary Friday, 30 August, for the seasoned scuba diver. Except it wasn’t. Suddenly something smacked his head with an incredible force. It felt as if someone had hit him
but Connie (48) was completely mystified because he knew there was nobody else around.
He tried to move his neck but couldn’t. Then as his diving mask went dark with blood it suddenly dawned on him what had happened: the spear gun he was carrying had probably hit against a reef when the big wave hit, causing the trigger to be released.
He’d accidentally shot himself.
It’s the stuff of nightmares. He was skewered – the 1,5 metre-long spear had penetrated his right cheek and gone right through his face, coming out between his left eye and ear.
Connie, a pastor at CityHill Church in Umkomaas on the south coast of KwaZulu- Natal, knew the worst thing
he could do was panic. With adrenaline coursing through his body, he had to fight hard to stay calm to prevent further injury.
“You’ve got to process what’s just happened to you,” he says. “I was just aware of the spear that was stuck to my face.”
Although he was only about 20m out to sea off Scottburgh near Durban, where he’d been diving for crayfish, getting to shore felt like an insurmountable challenge. The spear had pierced his diving mask, making it impossible to remove, and it was full of blood so he was unable to see.
Feeling increasingly desperate, Connie started screaming for help as he blindly tried to get closer to shore, praying that someone on the beach would hear him.
“I wanted people to know I was out there,” he says.
HIS screams did the trick. Local fishermen and staff at the beach shop scrambled to rescue him and called an ambulance. Connie remained lucid the entire time. But because he wasn’t sure how long he’d stay conscious, he told them his name and gave them the phone number of his wife, Cathy.
“I remember getting to the last four digits and thinking to myself, ‘I can remember numbers. My brain is still active’,” he recalls as he chats to us at his home in Umkomaas just five days after the accident.
As soon as the ambulance arrived, his rescuers cut the handle of the arrow with an angle grinder to shorten it so he could fit in the vehicle. The pain every time someone touched the shaft was excruciating, he recalls.
But despite this, Connie remained alert to everything that was happening around him.
In the ambulance he overheard paramedics saying metro police would be closing off the M2 freeway so a helicopter could land to airlift him to St Anne’s Hospital in Pietermaritzburg.
“I remember thinking, ‘They’re blocking off the freeway for me? Who gets this done for them’,” he jokes.
Luckily before the freeway was closed Cathy (47) was driving towards the scene. She stopped when she saw the two emergency vehicles parked on the side of the road, waiting for the helicopter, only to find her husband was in one
of them, lying on a stretcher with a spear in his head.
“I said I’m taking a picture because this is going to be a miracle,” Cathy recalls.
Friends and family members had already started praying for his recovery after seeing harrowing photographs that an onlooker had snapped of Connie on the beach and shared on social media.
The pictures were so disturbing that Cathy called their daughters, Cayla (20), who’s studying architecture at the University of the Free State, and Katie (16) who’d just left for Johannesburg for a dance competition, to warn them to steer clear of social media.
“I just said to them that whatever they do, they must not go onto any platform or let anybody show them the pictures because we were trusting that this was going to be a miracle,” Cathy tells us.
She says at this point she was feeling hopeful because the paramedics sounded positive about her husband’s condition. But by the time they arrived at the hospital his temperature had dropped to 35°C, which delayed the operation by a few hours – medics had to work to get his body temperature to at least 36°C.
At around 3pm, maxillofacial surgeon Dr Ciaran Lalor was finally able to remove the shaft in a 45-minute surgery.
“He grabbed the spear head in a vice grip and gave the other end two taps with an orthopaedic mallet, and it just came right through,” Connie explains.
He says the doctor also had to insert a permanent plastic sheath to prevent his eyeball from moving backwards in the socket because of the damage. “So now I’m not a man of steel, I’m a man of Tupperware – every woman’s dream,” Connie says with a loud chuckle.
He considers himself lucky to have been able to walk out of hospital just two days after his near-death experience with only two tiny scars on his face to show for it.
“If you could cookie-cut a miracle, this is it,” he says.
After his surgery, a nurse told him they were instructed to prepare to ventilate him. “I could’ve died. Apart from being maimed, not being able to see, speak or hear, I could’ve had a tube down my trachea and been on a ventilator,” Connie says. “It’s an absolute miracle.”
He’s had his fair share of bumps and scrapes during his 12 years as a scuba diver. “Normal things,” he says – such as being pushed into reefs by waves and currents.
In a more bizarre encounter, a shark bit him on the arm about five years ago while he was trying to feed it a sardine. “I threw the sardine over my shoulder and the shark came and bit my arm.”
It came back for a second bite but a friend who was diving with him punched the shark and it swam away.
“It wasn’t going for me, it was going for the sardine,” Connie insists.
Fortunately his injuries weren’t serious and he didn’t need surgery.
“Maybe God was saying to me back then, ‘Hey, catch a wake up.’ But I obviously didn’t so he thought he’d give me some heavy metal in my head,” Connie jokes.
These two events have made him even more determined to encourage people to live to the full. “God has put breath in you for a reason. Are you doing something that wakes you up in the morning?” he asks.
For him, one of the things that gets him going is scuba diving, and his terrifying freak accident hasn’t changed that – as soon as he’s fully recovered he intends heading back into the sea.
“Too many people fear death,” he says. “And they fear it to the point that they don’t live.”
‘I was just aware of the spear that was stuck to my face’