The small boat with its red and white sails skims across the sparkling water. A lone sailor on a blissful blue Sydney day, the sun on his face, the wind and the water rushing past.
Four years ago, Mick O'Dowd thought he would never be able to do this again. In the aftermath of a devastating illness, he could only hope to have the kind of freedom most people take for granted.
It is almost a miracle that he is sailing on his own. He had missed it so much. Not so long ago in another life he had been out on the water all the time, "on the boat with friends. It was a big part of my life", he tells Australian Story.
He was a passionate scuba diver who used to dive shipwrecks, "going out through the Heads early in the morning, the sun rising, the sea flat, it is just beautiful". And he was a cyclist too; big, strong, fit, active. An outdoor man and an engineer by trade.
But then everything changed. And it happened so quickly; from feeling unwell at Christmas lunch to life support on Boxing Day.
Mick's body was shutting down
It was 2018 and the whole family was there for a hectic, noisy, happy Christmas Day. While he was manning the barbecue, Mick began to feel "really hot and uncomfortable". As the afternoon wore on things became worse and worse.
By that night, Mick was leaning against a brick wall at Canterbury Hospital emergency, "just trying to breathe through the pain", while he waited to see a doctor.
He was diagnosed with sciatica and sent home at 7:00am on Boxing Day. But a deadly infection was racing through his body.
Back at hospital later that day, things got very serious, very fast. Mick's blood pressure was low, his heart rate was high, his breathing shallow. He felt as if he was dying, and he was right. On life support he had a 20 per cent chance of making it to the morning.
Mick had sepsis, an overwhelming immune response to an infection that spreads through the body, affecting multiple organs. His body was shutting down.
The doctors explained it to his stunned wife Katharine.
"The initial infection in Mick's muscles was strep A myositis, just a very common bug that somehow made it into Mick's bloodstream and attacked his muscles," she says. "That in turn led to septic shock and multiple organ failure."
Mick was one of the 55,000 Australians who contract sepsis every year, at least 7,000 of whom will die. Every hour diagnosis and treatment are delayed, the risk of death increases by 8 per cent.
"A few minutes," Katharine tells Australian Story, "can be the difference between life and death. The frightening thing is it can happen without anyone realising there's a big problem at all."
Medications were being poured into Mick to provide life support.
He woke from his coma on New Year's Day. He was alive, he had beaten the odds, but by then his hands and feet were black and withered. And he knew.
"I just remember looking at my hands. I just thought, 'OK I'm going to have to have amputations because it is dead tissue and that is the only way I am going to survive this'," he says.
He would have all four amputations in one massive operation. The recovery would be long, difficult and painful.
In ICU for six months, he was unable to speak because he needed a tracheotomy tube. And then there were more gruelling months of rehab at the Prince of Wales Hospital. "My focus was just to get home," he says.
'I'm still the same person'
A year later, Mick came home to a "new normal". Early on, he says, "it was more of the frustrations and just not coming to terms with what had happened. I've spent a lot of time with psychologists so I 've worked through that".
But Mick was still Mick.
"It's been a big thing to learn that I'm still the same person," he says. "I just can't do the things I used to do. I think the hardest thing to cope with is not being able to do very simple things I used to do like put up a shelf. I have to accept that I have to get someone to help me."
When he first spoke to Australian Story in 2020, he was still finding his way, looking forward to getting prosthetics, hoping he would be able to drive a special car, dreaming of one day scuba diving again.
Mick has come a long way in three years, although "sometimes I feel I've made no progress because I still require a lot of help to get my breakfast, make a coffee, have a shower".
But he gets to spend more time with the kids, takes them to school with a carer driving, or with them walking beside his motorised wheelchair, to all their after-school activities.
"I didn't realise how short the day is when you're a stay-at-home dad. By the time you drop the kids and do something you're going to pick them up again."
He takes them to the movies, "and take their friends because the parents are working. I'm stronger than I ever used to be, I've got a lot more stamina so I can do more things around the house. So the new normal is today's new normal, it could be different in a year".
Katharine says, "I don't think we've fully adjusted. I don't know if we ever will, because things still change. There is still progress to make for Mick.
"He is not settled with his prosthetics or assisted technology. I know he feels incredibly frustrated and sometimes overwhelmingly sad about what's happened."
She knows now that it is a long game. "Mick's come so far in a relatively short time. We still have quite a few challenges, but we have a way of working through them and I feel really positive about that."
And Mick has been proactive. "It's about learning what you enjoy," he says. He's learning to drive and has a special modified car on order. And he found a way to start swimming again.
"It has definitely been a relief to Mick to find he can still have fun doing things on the water or in the water," Katharine says.
It started with hydrotherapy, "just swimming laps". Then he taught himself 3D-printing with new design software, "and made these fins for my legs".
He was nervous at first, "because you just don't know, once you lose your arms and legs how you're going to float, you don't realise how many muscles you use in your body to keep yourself upright".
But now it is basically "get into the pool and off we go. It feels fantastic".
Then he started researching scuba diving and found Lyndi Leggett at The Scuba Gym.
"It was a confidence thing to take that next step of putting on scuba gear and hopping in the pool and just not having the legs to move around. There are two people in the water with me all the time making sure I'm OK. But after a couple of dives, it's starting to feel how it used to."
He would love to get back in the ocean one day, "even for just one dive, to see a reef, a blue grouper. But if we get there, we get there".
'Amazing feeling' to have 'total independence'
Then, through a family friend, Mick discovered Sailability, a volunteer group who take people with a disability sailing. In the dinghy, he uses joy sticks to guide the boat.
"I need assistance to get into the boat, but once I'm in the boat, I'm independent and I'm sailing the boat, which I never thought I would be able to do," says Mick.
"It's such an amazing feeling out there because I've got total independence and it is just so enjoyable. And you get to meet amazing people through sailing with disabilities as well."
He still has his "ups and downs, like everybody does", and admits there are days when "things become quite overwhelming. Anyone who's been through major trauma would have this, it's just learning to accept these things. I've been given quite a few tools with psychologists of how to work through those days".
Today he sees his family as "a normal family". "The kids have adjusted to the way I am, I'm in the wheelchair. Everybody has issues in the family. There's a lot of parents out there with disabilities.
"I have still got my friends and my family. We still do things together. I like to be busy, I'm always looking for something to keep my mind active. You just have to accept that some things aren't the same. And yeah, life's good."
And he has a strong message. The symptoms of sepsis are rapid breathing, rapid heart rate, muscle aches and pains, shivering, shaking and mental confusion.
"I wasn't aware of it until it happened to me," he says."It was a different kind of unwell that I have never felt before. Go to the doctor or the emergency department because the sooner you can get to it the better."
Watch Australian Story's update on Mick O'Dowd's story in A Matter of Minutes on ABC iview.
