Deep-Dive Therapy : Psychology: Ocean Escapes wants to build a 30-foot-deep ‘People-Quarium’ to help the disabled ignore gravity and feel again the liberating effects of virtual weightlessness.

Bill Wise was the 26-year-old co-owner of one of the East Coast’s first Hobie surfboard dealerships, an experienced “water person” with a passion for surfing and scuba-diving when he broke his neck in a surfing accident in 1965.

In the instant his head smashed into a sand bar off Bethany Beach, Del., the athletic father of three young sons became a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down.

Every day since then, Wise’s wife Rosalie has had to dress him and help him into his wheelchair. With paralyzed hands and partially paralyzed arms, Wise even needs help to roll over in bed.

But through it all--through the drastically curtailed activity and “the enormous discomfort and heaviness” that is his constant companion--Wise daydreamed of once again experiencing the joy and exhilaration of moving freely underwater.

“It was kind of just that, a dream,” he said. “It wasn’t anything that was very realistic.”

Last July, however, Bill Wise’s dream came true: He and three disabled persons from Southern California shed their wheelchairs and went scuba-diving in the Bahamas.

With his 190-pound body virtually weightless in the 80-degree water off Grand Bahama Island, Wise explored the coral reef and swam with the colorful tropical fish that reminded him of a “display of women’s earrings in some posh designer shop.”

The foursome had come to the Bahamas to film a promotional documentary for Ocean Escapes, a nonprofit organization formed in 1988 to develop aquatic recreational and rehabilitation programs for the physically challenged.

Ocean Escapes founder Gary Fagner, who trained the disabled quartet and accompanied them on their dives, has a dream of his own: To raise money to build a $3-million, 12,000-square-foot aquatic therapy center for the disabled in Oceanside in 1991.

The proposed aquatic center would include a 1,400-square-foot warming pool, a Jacuzzi for hydrotherapy, a 25-meter swimming pool, physical therapy and weight-training areas and classrooms.

But the focal point of the first-of-its-kind facility would be a tri-level, 30-foot-deep diving tank designed to simulate the ocean environment and meet the special needs of the physically challenged.

The glass-enclosed, 4,200-square-foot tank, complete with an underwater cave arch and atmospheric lighting, would include a clear diving bell so divers needn’t surface during training sessions. It also would boast a communication system to allow divers to talk with their families and friends, who would be able to watch them re-experience freedom of motion through large viewing windows.

Fagner calls it a “People-Quarium.”

“I think the primary focus of what we’re doing is the psychological benefit of weightless therapy,” he said. “It’s such a new and imaginative area to inspire the hopes and dreams of the physically challenged community.”

Fagner couldn’t have picked a better person than 51-year-old Bill Wise of Harrington, Del., to illustrate the psychological benefits of scuba-diving for the disabled.

Sitting on the boat in the Bahamas anticipating his return to the ocean after 24 years, Wise was moved to tears as he talked about fulfilling his longtime dream. And despite some unspoken trepidation about returning to the watery environment in which he had nearly drowned, Wise was eager to get wet.

“Let’s go!” he said.

“Once my head went underwater, and I was able to look around that tropical setting, it was fantastic,” Wise later recalled. “It made me forget all the things that confined me and weighted me down. It was magnificent: the underwater life, the fish. I was just enthralled.”

But more impressive than the beauty of the reef life around him, he said, was the liberating effect of being in a weightless underwater environment.

“There’s nothing to compare with the physical freedom for somebody who is so severely paralyzed to be underwater because you can maximize the muscle power you do have,” he said. “I could turn myself upside-down and, with just simple moving of my hands and arms, jockey myself into positions that would be just impossible from a wheelchair.”

Indeed, as Wise said shortly after resurfacing from his ocean dive: “The mobility I felt underwater is probably the most free I’ve felt in the 24 years I’ve been paralyzed.”

The three other disabled persons on the trip shared similar reactions.

Back on the boat after her dive, an overwhelmed Jan Sherman of Santa Ana talked enthusiastically about having done underwater somersaults.

“The movement of going up and down and the feeling of gliding through the water was thrilling,” recalled Sherman, a paraplegic who hadn’t been in the water since a 1968 car accident. Since returning from the Bahamas, she has taken swimming lessons.

“This really opened up the world of water to me again,” she said.

When Gary Fagner talks about Ocean Escapes, the veteran professional scuba diver does so with evangelical zeal.

“I say Ocean Escapes is to therapy what Disneyland was to amusement parks,” he said. “It has an element of imagination in it, and it is so inspiring. It’s new hope. People say: ‘I can get out of this chair. I can become weightless. I can fly!’ ”

Although other clubs and organizations teach scuba-diving programs to the disabled, Fagner says Ocean Escapes is unique.

“This is the first medically supervised diving program that has taken the sport of diving and specifically applied it for its value as a form of therapy,” he said. “The big benefit of being totally immersed in water is that you work in a three-dimensional, weightless environment that is having a powerful psychological impact on those who are physically challenged.

“The whole idea is, we’re taking somebody that’s trapped by gravity and eliminating gravity. Not until space travel opens up will there be a better form of therapy.”

Fagner emphasized that the Ocean Escapes program is not intended to replace conventional therapy.

“We have what I call an extended outpatient program that looks at these people after they’re out of conventional therapy,” he said.

The planned Ocean Escapes aquatic therapy center would not only be used for diving instruction, conducting underwater therapy programs and training medical personnel in how to use weightless therapy in their own programs, but it would serve as a center for conducting aquatic therapy research.

Plans call for studies to measure the attitudinal and behavioral changes that occur among disabled divers before and after starting aquatic therapy and scuba programs, in addition to studies that will measure the aerobic benefits of aquatic therapy.

“There literally has not been that much done in this area in terms of research,” said Fagner, who began working with physically challenged children in a YWCA swimming pool in El Paso, Tex., in 1977. “We know aquatic therapy is effective, and we intend to put that word out and show people how to do a better job in rehabilitation and to use aquatic therapy effectively.

“One of the ways we intend to do that is with this jewel we call the People-Quarium.”

Fagner now conducts weightless scuba therapy and diving instruction for the physically challenged in swimming pools in Newport Beach and Oceanside. But working with the disabled in an eight-foot-deep swimming pool, he said, is nothing compared to what it would be like in the planned 30-foot-deep People-Quarium.

“When you’re working in a shallow pool, you’re still working in a two-dimensional, or narrow, plane,” Fagner said, illustrating the difference with an analogy:

“If you’re sitting in a room that has an eight-foot beam overhead and you stretch up, your hand is only a foot from the ceiling. If I put you in a room that’s 30 feet high, and I tell you you can float up and touch the beam, that would be quite an experience for you--to literally float up and touch the beam 30 feet above.

“And so that third dimension becomes very important. That’s why the facility is needed. If you’re going to do weightless therapy, you need to expand the dimension.”

Dr. Robert Umlauf, program coordinator for the spinal cord injury program at Sharp Rehabilitation Center in San Diego, agrees.

“The three-dimensional aspect without gravity is real powerful,” said Umlauf, adding that disabled persons who have gone through the scuba program “say that’s one of the first times they’ve felt completely free, that their wheelchair doesn’t slow them down in any way.”

Added Umlauf, who is serving as a consultant to evaluate the psychological aspects of the Ocean Escapes program on the disabled: “It really does have a big impact--on their emotional well-being, relationships with their family and their outlook on life.”

Particularly beneficial, he said, is that scuba-diving is an activity that families and friends can share with the disabled.

“I see water as an equalizer,” he said.

And that’s a great benefit, said Dr. William L. Hamilton, Ocean Escapes medical director.

“I just think the freedom of movement these people will gain from this kind of activity will benefit them not only physically but psychologically,” said Hamilton, a family practitioner who is on the board of directors at the Timpany Center, an indoor therapeutic and recreational pool in San Jose.

Hamilton, who will conduct Ocean Escapes’ aquatic research, said there are many psychological barriers that prevent disabled individuals from participating in normal activities during certain stages of their impairment.

“I have patients who, because of their disability, want to be waited on hand and foot,” he said, adding that he has other patients with the same disability who scuba-dive and travel all over the world.

Programs offered by Ocean Escapes, he said, “can promote self-esteem among the disabled so that they are able to become productive members of society and can prevent an impairment from becoming a handicap.”

Hamilton also will evaluate the accessibility of recreational and resort facilities, with the ratings to be published in the Ocean Escapes newsletter in order to encourage more physically challenged persons to travel.

As Fagner said: “The ocean is the ultimate experience. That’s where we want to get everybody in the end.”

To get the proposed Ocean Escapes aquatic center off the ground, Fagner last year enlisted the financial support of Susan and Hobie Alter of San Clemente-based Hobie Designs Inc.

In funding Ocean Escapes’ initial capital program, the Alters helped pay for the trip to the Bahamas last summer to film the promotional video. Santa Ana-based Donny Osmond Entertainment Corp. supplied the film crew, and Osmond, an Irvine resident, has joined Alter and 1984 Olympic gymnastics champion Peter Vidmar as honorary members of the board of directors.

Fagner said he is now searching for a major underwriter and corporate sponsors for the proposed aquatic therapy center. Ocean Escapes launched its fund-raising program last month with a fund-raiser for a group of 15 potential donors aboard the Alters’ boat in Newport Harbor.

Although the Alters are avid divers themselves, they have a personal reason for supporting Ocean Escapes: Hobie Alter has known Bill Wise since Wise began selling Hobie surfboards nearly 30 years ago.

As Alter sees it: “You’ve got handicapped parking, but how about a place where these people can actually do something and appreciate? And what it does for them, I don’t know how to explain it--it’s such a giant mental lift. It’s not that they’re going to be diving every day, it’s the memories. And, actually, the memories last a lot longer than the dive.”

“What was most appealing to us,” said Susan Alter, “was it would fulfill Bill’s dream.”

She said her husband wasn’t able to go on the filming trip to the Bahamas, but she went.

“Oh, I didn’t want to miss that,” Susan Alter said. “To see Bill go in the water was the most moving experience I’ve ever had. And watching the reaction of Bill’s wife and daughter, was just as powerful as Bill going in the water. It linked them together.”

Indeed, when Rosalie Wise watched her husband through the window of the Underwater Explorers Society diving tank the day before he took his ocean dive, she cried.

“It was very emotional,” she recalled. “I really don’t know how to describe it. . . . Well, it was like when we were young. We used to go to the beach a lot and we swam a lot. It was just like an instant replay of that all over again.”

After taking a brief diving lesson from Fagner, Rosalie Wise joined her husband in the water during his ocean dive.

“I figured it would probably be our only chance to swim together,” she said. “It was kind of like a reunion under the water.

“And it was a wonderful rendezvous. We swam together on the bottom of the ocean, hand in hand.

“It was so neat.”