The Unlikely Doctor’s Record: He Lived 100 Days Underwater | News

Joe Dettori, 55, stared asking us for the interview in the shadows. It is not strange to feel the sun’s rays. It’s 30 degrees in the air and after a bit of rain early in the day, steam is really rising in Key Largo, on the little strip in far southern Florida. But it’s still fun. Sunshine is one of the things Joe Dettori missed most.

A few hours earlier, he was exploding on the surface in the small harbor as Neptune raised his head up and waved to the gang gathered on shore to watch the ascent. The last time he was above the roof was on the first of March on the calendar.

– We wanted to see what happened to the human body when it was allowed to exist in an isolated extreme environment, says Dettori.

It seems a lot.

During the more than three months he spent in an “underwater hotel” in Florida, he conducted a series of scientific experiments and tests on himself to see how much time he spent in a place where the air pressure was higher than above. The surface affects you in the same way that it lowers you high into the air.)

It got shorter under the surface

Their findings so far suggest that basically everything has improved. All signs of inflammation show half. He says they measured the severity of the brain improvement, too.

– My cholesterol level dropped by 40 percent, these are crazy numbers. I have no idea why that is. This is what we will now find out and analyze. This is the boring part of science, haha! They say, “We’ll meet in six months, and I’ll come up with results.”

But one thing was clear on Friday when it came in: It shrank.

I got about an inch shorter. It’s about pressure. Astronauts expand, water contracts. We knew that would happen. But I got over 1.85 so there was a bit of a take off.

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Dettori has a background in the US Navy and was an officer there before becoming a scientist.

How did it feel on a personal level to be trapped there for so long, what did you learn about yourself?

– I relied on my 28 years of experience in the Navy, I relied on meditation and my faith. Then it was just a matter of biting the bullet and beating it. So yeah, I’ve learned that you can persevere a lot.

Like a cracked cheek molar after twelve days. And a little later he developed a sinus infection.

– I got very dizzy, so I didn’t feel well. But this is what happens. You know, I knew it would be hard to answer – that’s why no one had ever done it before.

(The closest someone came before hitting a deep-sea doctor was every 73 days, which the two researchers put forward nine years ago.)

This is what the hotel looks like underwater

The “underwater hotel” itself is eight meters below the surface and consists of two cylindrical spaces, each about three by seven meters (but only half of that is usable surface). One cylinder is the bedroom and the other is the kitchen and living room. At the ends of both tubes are round, meter-sized windows where you can look at barracuda, spadefish and other exotic marine life.

In the middle, is the inlet between the cylinders. It’s like a hole in the ground that you dive into.

The point of the experiment was not the recording itself. It was partly to see what was going on in the body, he says, and partly to pay attention to the marine climate.

During the 100 days, he conducted numerous video interviews with schoolchildren, after which the experiment garnered attention all over from CNN, the BBC, the New York Post, and the Jerusalem Post.

– We have reached out to thousands of young people and we can talk about how to preserve and protect the marine environment.

“loss of physical contact”

How did your family react to you doing this?

– My daughters said “Oh, Dad, it’s usual for you to do something crazy like that.” So it was a little difficult. But they supported me. I received so much love from the family while I was here.

He says he was able to keep in touch with the kids, his wife, and his mother via video calls, and even had visitors under the surface. But it was not – of course – an ordinary daily life.

What you miss is physical contact. It was a bit like during covid – you had to learn not to touch each other. But now after the pandemic, people want to touch each other. So you can say this: now there will be a lot of hugs. And then I really crave a cheeseburger!