Knocked to the floor with nothing to breathe, the first thought is: Get Up and Run. This instinctive response was addressed in training. Our trainers were old navy, grizzled Chief Petty Officers with experience of everything you might possibly imagine and much that you could not.

Our instructors patiently explained that if you get up and run, you will burn oxygen that you do not have. Even worse, you will burn this non-existent elemental necessity at an increased metabolic rate. They gave rough estimates of how far we might get, competing amongst themselves to provide the most pessimistic outcome. A distance between ten and fifteen feet was the rough consensus. At that point, our demand for oxygen would become so extreme we would rip off our face masks. That last desperate action would leave us fully exposed to a toxic atmosphere already severely deficient in oxygen.

We would be left panting, sucking in great gulps of poisonous air, each breath prompting an attack on our central nervous system. We might stumble forward a few dozen feet, gasping as we went, before finally collapsing in an unconscious heap. Brain death would begin within two minutes. Essential bodily functions would stop within five.

The senior CPO gave us a disgusted look and described the likely outcome –  a hero’s funeral. Then he spat on the deck and told us we didn’t deserve it. “Cause you were yellah. You died runnin’ away. A bunch of stupid fucks. Eager to jump in a pine box and celebrate the end of your days.”

What they trained us to do, told us we had to do, was to lie motionless on the deck. To move not a single muscle, as every possible movement, each twitch, even the most minute, increased our demand for oxygen. We had to resist the urge to remove our mask. That was certain death.

To regenerate our air supply we must make small, almost imperceptible puffs of breath, to push a minute amount of air through the re-breather network of hoses and tubes, to move a puff of air into the regeneration canister. It would take five minutes they explained. Perhaps ten before the system rebuilt the lost volume. Ten minutes of doing nothing but lying absolutely still. And making ridiculous tiny little air puffs when body and brain were both screaming for oxygenated air, huge volumes of it.

So I lay there in the dark. And did as I had been instructed. And worked to return to the world of the living. One teensy puff at a time. Meanwhile, the attack line, pressurized to 130 p.s.i., was left abandoned to its own devices. The snake was no longer under human control. The untended boa became a cobra and started to weave within the confines of the steel alleyway, to strike the bulkhead on the left with a deafening crash before veering toward the starboard side bulkhead and crushing 35 pounds of bronze nozzle into the steel. This weaving snake of a hose line smashed open the control bail that sits atop each Rockwell nozzle and water discharged into the darkness, kicking up spray and flooding the deck on which I lay prone. I did nothing. I did not move. I remained inert in this dark death space as it rang with the sound of struck steel and a backwash of cold salt water flooded my garments.

While working on the first insurance appeal from November 2012 through to early January 2013, this is the event that constantly came to mind. If I was to survive, I had to exhibit steely discipline. If I was to survive, I had to summon every last fibre of my being, every atom of will power, and exert all of my effort in the act of survival. I had once proved to myself that I was capable of such exertion. Now I had to do it again.

I did not realize, as I lay on that wet steel deck, the nozzle slamming the bulkheads in the dark above me, that I was learning how to live. I did not realize the true value of this experience would come almost 40 years later, on those days when I fought for my life against the supreme indifference of the insurance company.