20 Pools - A Swimming Odyssey: Pool #9: SIRC Hydrotherapy Pool

The hydrotherapy pool at the Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Center just outside of the Kathmandu Valley is both the smallest and most hilarious pool in the 20 Pool Odyssey. And while I didn't really get a workout in, it yielded the craziest scene of this entire series.

When I got to the SIRC in March of last year, I was taken on a tour of the 50-bed (now 80+ bed!) facility and marveled at how modern everything was. Just ten months earlier the campus resembled a war zone as emergency tents were set up to house the nearly 100 new spinal cord injures suffered during two major earthquakes occurring only two weeks apart. I'd seen pictures and videos of the facility and assumed I was going to an African refugee camp.

But in the space of ten months they had streeted all but the most severely affected patients -and hired three of them as peer counselors. What I saw was a fully equipped rehab hospital with modern, and in many cases, brand new physical and occupational therapy tools. There was also a busy job training center, a super-tough wheelchair obstacle course and, to my great surprise, a swimming pool.

The hydrotherapy pool was tucked away in the basement next to the PT gym and was so unused the woman giving me the tour couldn't find the lights. It was only ten meters by four meters and sunk to a maximum depth of four feet. So while I was hoping to find a local workout pool for daily training, this wasn't going to be it.

As the weeks went on, I pretty much forgot the pool was there, as did, it appeared the entire staff. It seemed the only time it was ever used was as a showpiece for foreign visitors on their tours. But eventually my film schedule got around to shooting physical therapy videos and the head of the department put hydrotherapy on her list of subjects she wanted covered.

Just like all the other shoots, we scheduled a therapist and a patient then began plotting out camera and microphone positions. The difficult part about this shoot was that I couldn't strap a microphone onto the therapist or the patient because they would be popping in and out of water. But because of the unique location, it was one of our most successful shoots. The therapist, Ramesh Khadka, put on a suit and expertly took his patient, Dilip Sapkota through a series of exercises using water as the perfect resistance it is. The microphones on the cameras were super echo-y, so Ramesh came up to our editing suite a few days later and did voice over work. All in all, it was a great shoot  (Vid: http://bit.ly/2nsWHFx).

But that was the last I saw of the hydrotherapy pool for the next few weeks. And then I discovered why: nobody knew how to swim! Then one day, my assistant Rownika ran up to me and, while trying to hold back her laughter (which she never could), told me we had to get the cameras and run down to shoot at the hydrotherapy pool! "All the men are trying to swim," she said, "And they can't!"

I grabbed my camera and rushed down to the tiny pool that now contained five wheelers and seven therapists. They were in a combined state of elation and panic as one by one, they would maniacally close their eyes and splash their arms in an attempt to get to the other side of the pool. I started filming, but then the coach inside of me just couldn't take it anymore. I dropped down to my boxers, slipped out of my chair onto the floor and made my way to the pool.

There was a metal fence around the pool, and it was way too shallow to just flop in, so I had to push myself along the floor to an access ramp. Once my legs were free and floating, I got the attention of two wheelers and told them to watch while I breathe and swim at the same time. There was only enough room for four strokes, but I could show them how the front crawl works.

After just a few times up and down the pool, the therapists started watching and finally I had everyone's attention. At this point, Rownika is laughing so hard she could barely hold on to the camera. Although they desperately wanted to learn how to swim, none of them were actually listening to what I was saying. They nodded their heads in agreement, then go back to their out-of-control arm slashing and panic breathing.

After 30 minutes of this, I made my way out of the pool and back into my chair. I told them we needed to take this exercise over to the Club Moses pool where I could teach them how to swim. They enthusiastically agreed and plans were made for a field trip that would never eventually take place. That happens a lot in Nepal.

But about a month later, I rolled by the pool and one of the therapists was back in there by himself - still splashing without breathing. I slowed him down, repeated my lesson on breathing and he finally got it! One down, 28 million to go.