This is the sixth in a series recounting close encounters with death by Jamaicans

AT a glance, consultant orthopaedic surgeon and sports administrator Dr Warren Blake doesn’t look like he has nine lives, but his myriad stories of close encounters with death suggest he is among the luckiest men on earth.

The easy-going president of the Jamaica Administrative Athletic Association’s 50-odd years on earth has been littered with narrow escapes and, in his own words, sheer excitement.

He was held up by gunmen seven times; almost died when he fell 50 feet from an ackee tree; and was left drifting alone at sea with a life jacket as his salvation for six hours before being rescued.

There were other incidents throughout Dr Blake’s life that had him perspiring profusely, thinking that he was close to meeting his maker, but uncannily, he lived to grin about them.

“I have had my fair share of close encounters with death, but the most telling was when I fell from an ackee tree while I was a final-year medical student,” Dr Blake told the Sunday Observer.

“This was the December before my final exams in May. I was at home in Havendale and was high up in the ackee tree and literally out on a limb. The limb broke and I fell the equivalent of about three storeys, around 50 feet, and landed flat on my face,” said Dr Blake.

The fall left him with four double fractures of his ribs, three fractured vertebrae, a ruptured liver and ruptured kidneys, but his inner strength and being in peak physical condition saw him spending only a short time in hospital.

“I spent a week at the University Hospital after all of that. The doctors wanted to do surgery, but I convinced them that I was ok and that they should watch me a little more before they did surgery.

“They based the need for surgery on the fact that my blood pressure was very low. At the time it was 90 over 50 and they thought I was in shock, as the normal blood pressure i`s 120 over 80.

“I advised them that for me, 90 over 50 was not unduly abnormal, because my resting blood pressure — seeing that I was doing cross-country running and karate training at the time — was like 100 over 60, and if I lay quietly long enough, it would go down to 90 over 55. So 90 over 50 at that time was not unusual.

“The fact that my pulse rate was also very low, it was in the 50s, I pointed out to them that if I was in shock, as they thought, my pulse rate would be racing and not running at a low rate. They saw the wisdom of what I was saying and decided to observe me for a few hours. Needless to say, when they came back my blood pressure went up, as I was no longer comfortable with the idea of surgery, which was deferred.”

The following week, after being discharged as a patient, Blake, the trainee doctor, was back on duty on the same ward doing his surgical rotation. He was now the house officer — the young doctor looking after the same patients with whom he had sat with for breakfast. Quite a few of them were shocked as they hadn’t known he was a medical student.

“I did some research on people who survived falls from heights and it turned out that most of the people who survived these falls, fall flat on their face or on their backs, rather than on their heads or on their feet,” Blake explained.

“If I had landed any other way, I probably would not have been here giving this interview, probably there would not have been a Dr Blake at all,” he said cryptically.

“At the time I was prepared to meet my maker. If anybody told me that I would have survived my encounter with the ground, I would have told them no; because I fully expected to die. Living was the last thing on my mind. I had made my peace,” Dr Blake said.

Speaking of miraculous survival, Dr Blake reflected on the time he was stranded at sea, left to drift in open water for six hours before he was rescued.

The accomplished diver nonetheless admitted to several ‘scary’ experiences, including meeting up on sharks or having problems with diving gear, but none came close to the one a few years ago when he felt that he had drawn a ticket number in death’s departure lounge.

“I dive these days for pleasure and I hunt fish. Most of my diet nowadays is seafood. One day we were in the ship channel, anchored on a wreck, and about to go down. The sea was a little rough, and we violated one of the rules that we normally set, that after you jump off the boat, everybody meets on the surface and then go down.

“This time, because the sea was rough, we decided to meet on the anchor line going down. My friends rolled off the boat first and then I rolled over last. When I hit the water I realised that I had left my fins on the boat and with no fins, you cannot move about.

“The person on the boat was not a swimmer and wanted to throw the fins to me and I said no, because unless the fins dropped right in my hands, I would not be able to swim to them and by that time I was drifting away rapidly, because there was a very strong surface current, and in less than the 30 seconds it took them to get to the fins, I was like five to 10 metres away from the boat and moving away rapidly.

He said what ensued was a comedy of errors, “because when the other fellows came up and did not see me, they were told that I had gone down-sea, and when they tried to start the boat, it wouldn’t start”.

Things got even more dangerous for the surgeon adrift in the busy seaway.

“Because the Kingston port is a very busy one, a few ships came into the channel while I was drifting and that was a bit hair-raising, because if they had come close I could have been sucked into the propeller wash. But I figured that if that happened and they were coming towards me, I would let the air out of my life jacket, sink to the bottom and hold on to something at the bottom until the ship had passed, because I still had a full tank of air and I could go down for the time the ship took to pass and come back up,” explained Dr Blake.

He had a plan on how he could escape being chopped to bits by a passing ship’s propellers, but none to stop his steady drift past the mouth of the harbour and into deeper darker waters beyond.

“It was also getting darker in the day. I saw boats going down-sea and I figured they were going to look for me, because a number of them were going away from Lime Cay. I found out after that my friends had put out the SOS call and called the Coast Guard that I was drifting at sea and the boats on Lime Cay heard the distress call and came looking.

This started about 11 o’clock, and eventually, about five o’clock in the afternoon and six hours floating in the water, a boat finally came upon the castaway.

“It was after I was pulled into the boat that I realised how much of a toll the six hours in the water had taken on me. I couldn’t stand up. My legs were absolutely weak and I was hungry. Luckily they had some soup on board,” Dr Blake said.

During the six-hour ordeal, the survivor said he remained hopeful that he would be rescued. At no time did he believe that he would have become lunch and dinner for sharks, which often flock the area.

“Jamaica is not really known for aggressive sharks and when I tell people I scuba dive, that’s the first thing they ask me. We see sharks pretty often when we are diving, especially on the South Coast. There are some dives you go on, you know you will see some sharks, because there are spots where sharks live, but most of the sharks in Jamaican waters will not attack you unless you molest them. Sometimes when blood is in the water they might come around, but even then I have not found them to be aggressive.

“There are others sharks like the Caribbean Reef shark, the Black Tip shark, the Hammerhead and the Tiger shark, those are a bit more aggressive. Fortunately, we don’t see those a lot in our waters and if I see them I treat them with healthy respect, by swimming away from them, because most times I have fish with me, as I am looking a meal as well, and I am not going to be sharing my meal with any shark,” said Dr Blake.

Despite the near miss and severe sunburn, Dr Blake was back at sea the following week, diving for fish.

But even before that watery adventure, as a schoolboy at Kingston College and living in the innercity community of Trench Town, Blake was forced more than once, to view the business end of guns.

In a household in which the staple meal was bread, sardines, and sugar & water twice weekly, guns were just another threat to survival that he had to face.

“As a youngster growing up in the innercity, life was a little dangerous. You get many close encounters. People behave as if violence in the innercities is something that just started today.

“It has taken a slightly different form now, but it was always present. I have been held up so many times by gunmen and I was even attacked once by a machete wielder, who tried to take my head off. Luckily I saw the flash of the machete and moved my head and ended up with a horrible scrape across my neck and lost a bit of one of my ears.

At other times he said he was jumped by robbers. Like any youngster from the innercity going to parties, Blake was determined to save money and walk, rather than take a taxi.

“I have been pounced upon by men with guns a few times. They always took my money and made you wish that you had given it to the taximan afterall,” Dr Blake said.

“We used to go down the road toward Lincoln Avenue and play dominoes until the police came and would tell us, ‘youngsters, it’s time to go home, break it up, it’s late’,” he said.

“Religiously they would come and send us home about one o’clock every morning, because we would sit there and play dominoes, not knowing the passage of time. They were always very gentle about how they sent us home. They were never abusive and we usually heeded their warning and go home.

“One night I was walking home and a man just came out of the bush and came straight at me and when he was halfway across the road he went into his waist and one of the longest kitchen knives I had seen came out at me and he just started chopping!

“That was scary. I was even more scared then than when the gunmen held me up, because at least the gunmen said, ‘give me your money’ and you knew instinctively that they weren’t going to start shooting you. They were going to try to negotiate your money away from you, even though they had the upperhand and you could argue with them and say ‘leave me with a bus fare’ or something like that. But you knew that at the end of the day you would be left alive.

“When this guy came out, there was no discussion. He just had blood in his eyes, as if he were on a mission to kill. At that time I managed to duck the first two slashes of the knife, turned around and ran, and for the first time in my life screamed, ‘Help, help, murder!’ because I was trying to attract the attention of anybody who would be on the road at the time.

Dr Blake said he recalled that he had passed some people on the verandah of a house down the road and ran that way.

“When I jumped the fence in one leap and landed in the yard, everybody on the verandah bolted into the house except one man. When I saw how that man reacted, I realised that I was in danger yet again and I just put my hands in the air and said, ‘is somebody a run after me’. And it turned out that it was a good thing that I did that and not approach the verandah, because the man happened to be a policeman who had his gun in his lap and was about to shoot if I had ran up on the verandah, because they all thought that I was a villain coming to rob them,” explained the surgeon.

“So when I said somebody was after me, he came out with gun in hand, followed me up the road and actually walked me home, because I was dead scared to walk back up that road with that maniac with the knife, who turned back and just disappeared in the shadows when I jumped into the yard.

“To this day, I have no idea why he attacked me, or what he was about, or who he was. To me, it was just a maniac who wanted to kill somebody, because I cannot figure out a motive. That was one of the most dangerous moments of my life. If I hadn’t missed the knife, I knew he would have had me,” Dr Blake said.

These days, Dr Blake, who has represented Jamaica in target shooting (air pistol) at the Central American and Caribbean (CAC) Games, the Pan American Games and the Commonwealth Games and has a second-degree brown belt in karate, is bothered by nothing.

“Nothing bothers me in terms of fear. My fears died when I fell out of the ackee tree. That day I looked death in the face and he wasn’t that scary. I don’t worry about that anymore,” Dr Blake said.