You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts.

My name is Dwayne Meadows.

On the day after Christmas in two thousand and four, I survive one of the world's worst natural disasters.

To this day, what gets me through thinking about it is thinking about all of the helpful things that people did in the face of this immense disaster.

There was so much help that made things even just a little bit better for everyone.

Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were forever altered after having almost died.

These are first hand accounts of near death exp periences and more broadly, brushes with death.

Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition.

Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.

I grew up in rural Ohio, but I was a swimmer and I always love the water.

Early on, as a child, I wanted to learn how to scuba dive, and so I was able to get certified at the age of fifteen.

I had lots of little farm ponds and lakes around me, very small, and I would go and grab my gear and ask the ask the owners if I could just scuba dive and see what was in their lakes.

That kept me occupied as a teenager.

From there, I decided I would go to college to learn how to be a marine biologist.

It turned out to be something that was really interesting and people were willing to pay me to go to interesting places to look at interesting animals.

I had the.

Opportunity to go visit a college friend who was from and lived and worked in Thailand, and I got there on Christmas Day in the afternoon, so it was a holiday.

People were celebrating and.

Taking the time off, and I met a young German woman, Caroline, who was looking for the same resort that I was staying at, and we ended up talking about scuba diving.

We decided to meet in the morning and maybe go snorkeling on the nice beaches that they had there.

It was a lovely, beautiful sunny day, and after we finished our breakfast, we both decided we needed to go back to our rooms, but we agreed to meet in just fifteen minutes and unfortunately, that's when everything really started.

I was back in.

My bungalow, a little two room building right on the beach, looking out on the sea.

It was gorgeous.

I started to throw laundry into a big backpack, and I heard a scream, and then I looked out to the ocean and I saw some distance out, now, maybe a mile or something, this white line far out in the ocean.

That looked like some kind of small wave.

I knew it was a tsunami, but I thought, oh, this is just a tiny, little little wave out in the distance, and I thought I was going to be safe.

My bungalow was kind of up off the sand.

It was on a slope, and there were maybe five or six steps up to the actual level of my room, so I figured I was a little bit above the water level.

Just to be safe.

I thought, Oh, I'm gonna take my clothes and throw this backpack up on top of this armor furniture, and it's all gonna be good.

Maybe I'm gonna get my feet wet, but this kind of little wave might wash through and it's no big deal.

So I wasn't really scared at that point, but very quickly that started to change.

The next thing I remember, the water just comes gushing into my room and almost immediately fills it up.

There was no time to get out, and I just kind of remember bracing myself and thinking I could hold on and ride it out and see what happened, or this building is just going to be a death trap.

Everything just exploded as the wave came in, and I found myself underwater, just spinning and twisting and completely disoriented and not knowing what way was up and whether I could really survive just the force of the water.

I convince myself, I need to just calm down.

My air supply will last longer if I lower my heartbeat.

This is what we learn when we're diving and snarkling.

I was tossing and turning, and I could feel myself flipping around just like a.

You know, rag dollar whatever they say.

I was thinking I would swim up, but I had no idea which direction was actually up.

I still felt myself twisting and turning, so I felt very helpless.

The reality of the fact that I was not maybe gonna be able to make it out of this started to settle in.

I remember very distinctly saying goodbye to my son who was like six years old at that point and wasn't with me on this day.

He was still back home with his mother.

We were divorced, and thinking about my other family members and my parents were still alive.

Time just seemed to expand.

I don't know how long it lasted, but there were so many visions of my life during that time, and I felt like that's what I was really seeing in front of me.

As I was still in this dark, dark water, kind of just felt myself almost giving up to these thoughts and not really thinking about how to swim.

With my training, I had been able to hold my breath for three or four minutes underwater.

I'm guessing with all the stress and adrenaline and everything of this, it was probably more like a minute.

And a half.

Out of nowhere, I ended up popping up to the surface of the water, you know.

I remember that feeling of relief and almost euphoria surviving this thing like quickly changed to another sense of Oh my god, this is horrible.

The water was moving incredibly fast, like a whitewater rafting trip, and very quickly I was feeling lots of stuff hitting me, and as I start to look around, I can see debris everywhere now, and I mean cars floating in the water, bungalows, whole bungalows floating, and trees and wood with nails.

And they used a lot of propane tanks, I think for heating or cooling your refrigerators and whatever, and some of those were spewing gas and you could hear the hissing sound everywhere in the background, so it was very loud and still like crunching of debris, and the debris was coming into like big piles that were many, many feet high, so you couldn't see very far even if you really wanted to, because the piles were starting to come together, and the buildings were breaking up, and the metal was creaking like all these different sounds on top of screams.

I heard lots of people.

In the water screaming, but I never saw any for the longest time, because there was so much debris between us, and even the water itself was quite big, waves especially and just mud.

The water was so full of mud.

It was so chaotic with so many things in the water that I felt that I could only like look ahead of me and try to block things with my hands from hitting my face and my chest, and kind of my vital organs.

Was so rapid fire that like.

You couldn't really like look ahead of you and see something, even if it was thirty feet in front of you.

You know, I really started to get in a little panicked at all of the things that were hitting me and just not being able to really relax at all.

And I remember something pulling me under and realizing that I was barely above water and I had like strap on Tiva sandals, and something had gotten between my heel and the sandal and was pulling me under.

It was heavy.

I have no idea what it was, but I reached down take my sandal off, and just unconsciously I put a sandal on my wrist.

It just kept going and going.

At some point there, probably a few minutes, I ran into a palm tree.

And I had been noticing that the water level was basically the tops of palm trees.

And if you've you know, you ever spend any time at a tropical beach, you know, those things are thirty forty to fifty feet tall, And it made me realize just how deep the water was.

Clearly I was somewhere actually over what should have been land as I was grabbing onto the tree.

Basically the water was still hitting my back.

It was coming from behind me, and so the debris now instead of kind of floating with me, was hitting me, and sometimes hard, like enough that it would sort of knock your breath out almost.

So I just decided to let go and again.

Was floating in this kind of giant river.

I finally found the thing that really I think kind of saved me, which was.

A mannequin.

I had the lower half, just the legs and kind of the waist, and I hugged it close to my chest and it was helping me stay a little bit out of water and catch my breath.

And we just cruised along like that.

As the water kind of slowed down, I could finally start to look around me.

I realized I was actually really in the ocean.

Now, there there was ocean.

There was the mountains behind me, but nothing nothing looked familiar.

I really had no idea exactly where I was, and it was sort of hard to look around at this point.

There was so there were big piles of debris, wood trees, you know, I could see where the shore was.

I wasn't that far out.

I kept the mannequin with me.

I had kind of started to feel my body come down from all the adrenaline, and I could tell at some point my knee was hurting and it felt like things had been messed up in some way.

I couldn't really tell.

I couldn't see in the water.

But I thought, oh, this man would be a really nice crutch when I got to shore.

But I'll keep this.

And I also remember at some point thinking, this is like a great momento, and I really wanted to keep it.

And so I was swimming with this mannequin.

It was not a straight line from where I was to the shore because of all of this debris, and so I had to swim kind of round about probably half a mile to get this a quarter mile, and during that time I could hear people screaming asking for help.

I didn't see any other people except the one person I saw on a bungalow that I was swimming very nearby.

It was a tie woman, so I could just tell she was upset and hurt, but she was actually all the way on the top of a roof, like her hands hanging over the peak of the roof, so she was almost completely out of the water.

And able to kind of catch her breath and rest.

But she knew that she, like me, was also far out in the ocean and needed to get back to shore, and so I assumed she wanted help, and I swam over to this floating bungalow and I reached out the mannequin and she understood what I was saying, and she was willing to.

Give it a try.

I kind of said, I'm going to go with you and we'll go into shore.

And she came down into the water and she grabbed onto the mannequin, but she just, you know, her face was just barely above the water, and she just freaked out.

I don't think she knew how to swim.

She was kicking and screaming, and I couldn't get her to calm down, and she didn't want to stay in the water.

I thought I could maybe like tow.

Her in, but at the end she just climbed back up on the roof and I remember kind of motioning to her that I would swim in and then come back out to get her, and I meant it.

At the time.

It was silly.

I had really no idea what things were really like on shore, but I really meant it, and it haunted me for a long time afterwards that I wasn't able to find her again.

As I got closer to shore, I noticed these rocks that were along the coast, very close to the beach.

And the thing that caught my attention though, was that there were snails and muscleshells and other marine life that were growing on this rock.

But they were six or seven feet out of the water, and I knew that that was too high to be natural, that they were too far above the current water level that I was swimming in for that to be natural.

So what that told me as a marine biologist was that the water level was too low.

That rock should have only been two feet out of water, and it was six feet or seven feet out of water.

And that's how I knew there was another wave coming.

I just thought, I can't do this again.

I can't survive another wave.

It was clear from where I was at that the wave had gone a long way into shore and that I was nowhere near to the safety that I had just thought I was at.

I swam as quickly as I could to shore and got out, but I was very depressed at that point as I started to walk.

I could tell pretty quickly that my leg was injured, that I was going to be limping.

My hip felt weird.

I mean, I had cuts everywhere on my body.

In front of me, there was kind of a newer resort building, like concrete, unlike most of the bamboo kind of bungalows that most of us had stayed in.

It was three stories tall, was a lot.

Of it was just gone.

All the windows and glass and some of the walls were gone, but it was.

Still kind of there, and there was a gap between that one building and another, and so I started working my way in that direction.

And it was at that point that I really started to come across other survivors.

Some people were just completely hysterical, screaming for their loved ones, their children especially, or partners.

And I kind of suggested that maybe we should go up, hopefully the main road was okay or somewhere where there were more people, like another wave might be coming.

And it's not say.

We were all alive.

And while we saw a good share of dead bodies on the beach, it seemed like a lot of people had made it.

And I remember, you know, using that logic with people to suggest that you know their loved ones probably made it.

The fact that I came out of the water very far from where I had started.

When I was talking with people about like where their loved ones might be and why they weren't in the same place they were for some people that worked, and of course for some people they you know, we're just completely distraught.

It was at that point that I realized I still had my sandal and I was the only person who had any kind of footwear in our group of there's probably five or six people at that point, and I said, Okay, I'm going to put my sandal on, and I went in front of the group of people and just kind of shuffled my way through some of these puddles that we just couldn't avoid, to kind of make sure we weren't like stepping on anything like really sharp.

There were enormous piles of debris and puddles kind of just like in the ocean, like I described earlier, and so we had this crazy little trail of people making our way through this debris and trying not to hurt ourselves any worse.

We ran across some tie or Burmese workers that had been working on construction in the area that were mourning a dead relative that was there.

We were able to convince them to join us in leaving, and it was like right at that point that somebody in the group looked back and saw kind of exactly what we saw the first time, was another white line on the horizon and the wave coming in.

Everybody just sort of started to scatter and make their way up the hill as best they could, and we were just very lucky that for us the second wave turned out to be not as big as the first one, but in some places the second wave was bigger than the first.

There was basically one main road and behind it there was mostly a mountain and a national park with the forest land, and the main road had additional hotels and restaurants and shops.

Somebody, I think, motioned us over and had some bottles of water, and there were a few chairs, and I remember there was a tai Man who was running a little tourist shop and he stepped out and he offered me a baseball hat and he pointed to the sun and it said something in a little bit of broken English, and you know, convinced me I needed a hat to protect myself from sunburn.

It was just the smallest things at that point were just so amazingly helpful and useful.

And I was at that point that a man came by on a motorcycle and said, oh, there's another wave coming.

It's not safe here.

You should go up, and he pointed me up towards this resort that was up on a hillside.

And as I was going along, I came across this young Swiss girl at fourteen fifteen something like that.

She told me her name, and she said she was missing her family and siblings, and she was very distraught and crying and upset.

And I said, oh, come with me, we'll look for your family.

I was, you know, by myself.

I was missing Caroline, this friend I had met the day before, but I didn't have those family connections that a lot of people.

Were worried about.

And so she and I walked and we eventually came up this kind.

Of state dirt road.

There was like a hotel.

Check in administration area and a couple of buildings and then a lot of little bungalows spread out.

They sort of had like a triage area set up, and we're trying to figure out who had injuries that needed attending to and I said, well, but I've got some advanced first aid training which I had gotten through my work.

I could give IVS fluids to people, I could do stitches, and so I said, give me a couple of minutes and I'll help you guys out.

I need to kind of catch my breath.

I was still really like hyperventilating and just breathing hard and stressed and coming down from all this adrenaline, I think, and.

I did that.

I took the girl over and we sat in the shade between a couple of bungalows with a bunch of other people.

It was horrible.

It was the worst part of the day, at least after getting out of the water.

Part, because you felt helpless and you were looking at some people who were still hysterical, crying and screaming, some of them in pain from injuries, some of them pretty sure that some family member relative was seriously heard or had died they maybe have seen something happen.

And other people who were just catatonic, they just weren't moving at all, just blank stares.

I asked somebody else to look after the Swiss girl, and just as I had sort of done that, the guys from the triage area came over and said, we have this young boy.

He's kind of wheezing, he's turning blue.

We don't really know what to do.

Would you come take a look at him.

And they brought me over to this bungalow and this.

Boy was lying on a bed inside with his mother.

His name was Paul, and he was German.

And it turned out he had a hole in his chest, obviously from debris, so air was getting into his chest and basically compressing his lung and I knew I needed a dressing that would allow air to be pushed out but not allow air to get in.

Of course, we had just some very rudimentary first aid kits band aids, and you know that sort of stuff you get in a first aid kit you have in your car.

But amongst all the people that we put out the word and we were able to find some things to jury rig and that was sort of the story of the day, jury rigging first aid.

And we were able to stabilize Paul and get the air out of his lungs so that he could breathe better, but obviously it was still a very very serious injury.

From then I started to do first aid on other people, and then started to have more and more people to peer once they know somebody could do first aid.

We were on our own until a foreign nurse showed up who was on vacation and just happened to be a nurse and started to help, And very quickly after that a doctor arrived to help, And so in those early hours I really ended up doing first aid.

But for me it was really it wasn't so much about helping others.

It was a way not to think about what had been happening that day.

I hadn't even really looked out at the ocean again until somebody said, oh, there's another wave coming in.

I remember taking a little break and looking out at the ocean and sort of contemplating how massive this must have been.

We learned that the wave had washed out the main road.

There was no way for us to really escape.

The tsunami was caused by an earthquake measuring nine point three on the Richter scale off the coast of Bandace in Indonesia.

There were something like two hundred thousand people killed in Indonesia and Thailand I think was the second most.

They had eight or nine thousand killed and acknowledged before they really stopped counting, and in a very large percentage of those were within a few miles of where I was in Cowlak, So we saw a lot of the destruction and a lot of the death.

There were people from almost forty countries killed in Thailand in the tsunami.

I couldn't speak Thai, and I had very rudimentary German.

Sometimes we would need a couple of translators just to help us talk to somebody who was injured.

It very quickly became a realization of like the good in so many people, despite how injured they were, that they were doing whatever they could.

Those who were not hysterical or not catatonic, people really did try to step up and help strangers.

It just so happened I was able to get on the original flight I was scheduled to to return back to the States just a few days after the tsunami.

Finally I was on this plane with strangers, and I spent a long time just going through my mind all the all the injuries, and all the people bowl that had lost someone, And quickly got overwhelmed with the scale of it and the loss.

That I had seen.

And I think it was only then that I really started to tell myself that I needed to think about my own mental health.

I probably was going to have some sort of PTSD trauma response.

After I got back, my injuries to my upper leg and hip started to become more severe and really limited my mobility, and so I ended up spending too much time on the internet.

It was really the first, you know, global disaster where the Internet became a source of aid and assistance in communication amongst survivor.

I would go on these different websites where people would post messages about people that were missing, and I did the same and described Caroline, and I described where I was at.

And I would get a lot of questions from other people who were looking for someone who was staying at the resort I stayed at, or who worked at the resort in cow Lock, and they would send me pictures and asked me if I had seen them.

I had many, many, dozens, if not one hundred, messages like that.

It was really heartbreaking because I wanted to be honest, but I had seen so many people, and I would force my brain to sort of replay a lot of the events to think about if I had seen this particular face in the group of people.

I did first daid on and that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, Caroline had been doing the same thing, and she had remembered the name of the dive shop that I had used, who still had their central computer somewhere that was not destroyed, and had me in their records, had my email address, And so it took all those all those weeks for us to finally reconnect and realized that we were both alive.

Were able to go back to Thailand about four months after the tsunami and provide some humanitarian assistance and some underwater assistance.

Using our expertise as scuba divers.

We were able to walk around and pick up a couple pieces of debris that reminded us of the resort.

There was a tree that had managed to survive that was quite near the ocean that had a lot of pictures of people who didn't make it.

I think for me finally cemented feeling of how lucky we were.

I got lucky with the mannequin and with what did hit me and what didn't hit me, and what I hit and what I didn't hit to make it.

That day, there were a number of pictures of children who died in that area at Oar Resort, or one of the ones just immediately next door.

That was my moment of making a commitment to doing things to honor their memory and their loss.

I had some great contacts and mentors over the years who have given me these opportunities in a variety of different spheres to give back, and I gave money to help support a couple of children who were survivors.

I worked with some of my mapping skills to help create new risk maps for different areas of the West coast of these and think about ways that we could urge the government to start to plan better for tsunamis.

We have a huge tsunami.

Risk on the West coast, especially off Oregon in Washington, and I was also helping with shipwrecks and hurricane damage to coral Coral reefs are some of the most sensitive organisms to climate change, so it's it's it's going to be a difficult road for them.

But many other animals and habitats of the natural world that really bring us a lot of benefits, right, I mean, one of the things that that that you know, the experts tell us is core reefs.

They help protect us from big waves.

They give us.

Food and beautiful places to see and and without them, we either have to build things that at a great amount of expense to protect our our buildings and things on shore and hotels and restaurants at a tremendous extra expense to ourselves.

And so I think that's a message.

Welcome back.

This is a live again joining me for a conversation about today's story.

Are my other Alive Against story producers Nicholas Takowski and Brent Die And I'm your host, Dan Bush.

Brent, thank you so much for reaching out to Dwayne and talking to him.

This story resonates with me specifically because I was there.

I was not there during the tsunami, but I went there with the documentary crew shortly thereafter.

So the tsunami happened right around Christmas twenty two and four, and we left to document the situation in on the island of Sumatra near bond Ace in January.

So we were there pretty fresh, freshly after the incident.

And so there are a few things that I mean, I think I still have some forms of I guess you could call it PTSD.

I noticed some things that happened when I got back from having stood at the fresh Mass burials.

Twenty thousand people or more eighty percent of certain towns that we visited were completely gone, and the people as well, the populations were like down to twenty percent of what they were, and we interviewed these people.

And then at the time, I was in the mindset of, you know, I was I was the DPI, was the cameraman, and I was the sound guy.

I was all of these things in one and so I was I was so focused on that in the trenches of doing that and taking you helicopters from place to place because the roads were, you know, unusable, and collecting these interviews and documenting what had happened that I wasn't really I think a part of my brain had shut off.

And I think that's one of the things that we'll talk about with Dwayne's story, is it didn't hit him till he was on the plane what he had sort of just been through.

I think.

Anyway, Brent, can you tell us just kind of walk us into the story and tell us a little bit about why you were attracted to talking to Dwayne and what I think.

I think I had the same attraction to the story that you did.

My girlfriend at the time and I had planned a trip to Southeast Asia to begin in February of twenty twenty five.

So turning on the news Christmas morning and seeing that one of the worst natural disasters in history had pretty much wiped out southern Thailand and a lot of the other countries Bangladesh, even as far away as the coast of Africa.

There was even effects from the I mean, that's how dramatic this this event was.

So yeah, we went to Thailand right after this tsunami, my girlfriend and I.

Her father had served in the Vietnam War and was actually killed in ben Wo, so we went to see where he had served.

It was shocking to get to Bangkok and see just rows of rows of street dividers lined up with xerox photographs of victims, missing people from this tsunami that had taken two hundred and fifty thousand lives out of the entire impact area.

And that's just like as as Dwayne said, that's that's the number they got to when they were still counting, and some of these countries quit counting.

We would meet people on hikes who had been there when the tsunami hit, and they would describe this surreal, slow moving disaster that was coming at them.

You know, the water recedes and everybody's like fascinated by what's happening.

They got their their inclination is to walk down and look at the fish flopping around in the sand, and then the wave comes and knocks everything apart.

And what Dwayne went through is what a lot of people described that we met.

But it was just absolutely horrifying, and to think that something of this scale could occur in modern times, I mean, it's biblical.

This was the worst natural disaster recorded in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, or Thailand, and it was the third most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the world since modern seismography began in nineteen hundreds and two hundred and fifty thousand people were killed in fourteen countries in Southeast Asia, India, and Africa, and the fault line was a rupture of seven hundred and eighty miles and it was the longest duration of faulting ever observed, So the time it was rumbling was ten minutes.

Remotely triggered earthquakes as far away as Alaska, and the height of the teutonic plate shift was fifty feet, So the earth shifted fifty feet out there in the ocean to start.

All this from happening.

Jesus, it's a shocking event.

So I was really excited to talk to somebody who'd been there personally, and to talk to somebody with Dwayne's presence of mind through the whole thing.

He's a very measured person, a very thoughtful person, as you can hear, and just in the way he delivers information, I can see how he kept his wits about him through all of this and was able to calm people down in the most extreme situations.

I mean, I can't imagine if my children had been washed out to see or if my wife was missing.

I don't know how I'd be able to listen to somebody like Dwayne to say, let's get to higher ground, let's get to safety.

But he was able to do that, and I just think it's.

An amazing case of.

How people can come together in these extreme events and how different personalities really lend themselves to these situations.

There were two things that sort of struck me listening to his story profoundly.

One is what you just said, Brent and Nick, you might be able to speak to this too.

Is this.

We hear these stories of these people who find this resilience in the moments of crisis, and I don't know if it's everybody.

You know, I don't know if certain unspoken political leaders would find bundance, would find such resilience.

But there's something that kicks in and I don't know it's for everybody.

But and it might have been because Dwayne did not have any immediate family that he was you know, concerned about that would have allowed him the space to be able to become heroic and beaten into But after having survived this, I don't know how many hours did he say how many hours he was sort of wrestling with the first wave.

You know, it's funny because he describes these things and as sounds as if he's talking about something that might have taken may have taken three or four hours, and he's like, so thirty minutes later, you know, I'm at the shore and I'm like, wow, it happened so fast.

And I think what's interesting in that is how his sense of time was scaled to the moment as well, like he's going through this and he said it says, if you know, when he was tumbling in that first wave where he was tumbling like a rag doll, he said.

In the water, he said he felt like he was communing with his family back home.

He was saying goodbye to people, he was reviewing his entire life.

He was very calm, and he said it felt like that went on for minutes.

But knowing how long he can hold his breath, especially in an extreme situation like that, it couldn't have been more than ninety seconds at his top capacity to hold his breath, but he said it's probably more like thirty seconds that he was under but it felt like forever to him.

If you've ever had to fight any strong currents, you know that within a minute or two you're worn out.

So what struck me was this after having battled and you know, even just using your abdomen muscles to keep you afloat, or to keep your knees up, or whatever you have to do to stay in a certain position so you're not getting completely destroyed by the debris.

And other than the luck, he talked about just the luck of certain things hitting him and other things not hitting him.

To battle NonStop with every muscle in your body, to swim for an hour against these extremely massive, you know.

I mean, water is heavy and it's unstoppable, and it's just this this force that you know, you can't really reckon with.

But to survive that and then to be able to after a moment of catching his breath, find somewhere within him, within him the energy to start working first aid for other people, like without a thought, I just think that there's something I didn't I always I'm fascinated by that that's even possible, because it seems like after if you go in a wrestling match with somebody for five minutes, you're done for the day, if not a week, right, So but for him to just kind of be able to put that aside and to get up and continue to work, and it's something that I see.

That's the superpower in humans that happens in these situations and it's stunning to me that we have that capacity.

Well, not to mention, you know that this was an event where it felt as if okay, we were done, and then another wave comes or another you know, he describes even making it out of that first that first submersion and thinking okay, I'm oh wow, miraculously I'm on top of the water.

I survived and then now he has to deal with all the debris hitting him and this being pulled further out to sea, and then you know, he gets to the shore and he thinks he's done, and then he's he can tell by the water level that another wave's coming, and he's just like, I just didn't think I could do any more of this.

This was a constant, a rage.

You know, there was no you do the event and then you rest.

It was constant.

I think probably one of the things that makes that story so terrifying.

It's not just the fact that the you know, nature is so relentless, acts so relentlessly, and the fragility of you know, life itself in the face of that, but also that it is that like that moment when he gets to the shore and he's breathing and he you know, and he can see that the water level is you know, showing too much of the like or that too much of the algae on the rocks, and I think the most terrifying thing for me in that moment is this idea that it's like, as long as it's going, your body is going to stay.

You're going to stay in this high alert moment, and the second you have like a moments of rest and look around you and take a moment to actually absorb it, you understand the full horror.

And like him talking about that moment just like just sort of despairing for a moment before getting up and like, you know, try to get where he needed to go.

I think that like having that moment to breathe was probably probably made the whole experience actually a little bit more horrifying for him because suddenly he could take it in and he wasn't just looking at the problem immediately in front of him.

Right, you know.

I think that, like I think that the sort of sudden realization of one's own sort of misery in that moment is probably mentally intensely taxing for him To be able to just like keep plowing forward as really impressive.

He had no idea.

He knew how bad it was in colloc where he was staying, but he had no idea that this tsunami was so huge because they had no power, they had no communication with the outside world, so it was a shock to him.

I don't even know if when he got on the plane to go home, if he knew how huge this thing was.

Did Dwayne get into any like, what's it been twenty years, so it's been two decades.

Does he still suffer from any sort of PTSD or has he been able to sort of translate that into efforts to, you know, help other people or.

He said the way that he's dealt with his post traumatic stress is by being active in helping educate different coastal communities on the threat of tsunamis.

He's been to Oregon, he's been to Hawaii, He's gone back to Thailand to help.

He helped with the recovery efforts, and he met Caroline, the German woman that he had met while he was there, and they worked together.

They were able to kind of, through that return visit get some sense of closure.

This reminds me of another one of your stories, Brent, where I think it was Cliff but where he talks about the eleven Pentagon tragedy.

How when you're in the thick of that and doing everything you can to survive and help others to survive, you don't let tell your guard you're obviously fighting and you're doing something, so you keep moving forward and keep moving forward, and then finally when you get a moment to rest or, you take a shower or get on a plane and it hits you all of a sudden, you know what you've been through.

I think another thing that stuck out for me in this story was the small kindnesses that went a long way.

Like he said, when they were making their way up to the hillside, they passed through the part of the town that wasn't hit.

And I think this is another remarkable thing as you think of the entire town being devastated.

When he said, the man working there was like pointing at his head, like you need a hat, and he gave him a hat.

And he said, those little moments of kindness really went a long way.

And you see him talking about how everybody had something they could give, whether it was translating language for some, whether it was understanding how to set up a communication system to get word throughout the camp, what was going on, helping find people.

It gives me a lot of hope.

Actually this story for how people come together to help each.

Other, that's great.

That's nicely put Brent.

Next week on the Live Again, we meet artist Angeline Pass who, after suffering an almost fatal brain aneurysm, discovered a new relationship with her work and her life.

I had collapsed on the floor.

I don't even remember the pain in my head at that point.

I just remember everything getting dark.

I was like, oh my god, I'm dying, Like my body knew.

I want to keep seeing beautiful things.

I want to.

Eat and drink and travel.

It doesn't have to be Italy or you know, Europe.

It can be your backyard even.

Our story producers are Dan Bush, Keith Sweeney, Brent Die, Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelba music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez.

Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young.

Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support.

Our studio engineers are Rima L.

K Ali and Nomes Griffin.

Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhardt Slovitchka, Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez.

Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.

I'm your host, Dan Bush.

Special thanks to Dwayne Meadows for sharing his incredible story of survival and hope.

His story and the T shirt he wore on that fateful day are displayed at the Pacific Sunami Museum.

Thank you, Dwayne for inspiring us with your bravery and your commitment to making a difference.

Alive Again is a production of I Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures.

If you have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.

Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.

That's a l I ve e A g A I N p R O j E C T at gmail dot com.