In a world more connected and online than ever, it seems like there are precious few places left where you truly can’t be reached. A big one, underwater, is where I was four years ago, diving in the Sea of Cortez off Loreto, Mexico, when my husband had a serious accident back home in Florida, some 2,000 miles away.

I didn’t get the news, of course, until I surfaced to a barrage of missed messages. The hours that passed before I made it home and to the ICU are a blur, spent imagining the worst-case scenarios from his medical assessment: a traumatic brain injury from falling off a ladder.

As it turned out, my husband’s lucky stars were working overtime. He was out of the hospital in just two weeks, and things weren’t as bad as they initially seemed. After a month, he was back to work (sans ladders) and more or less back to normal.

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Once his neurosurgeon cleared him to dive again, the first thing we did was book a trip to French Polynesia. I wanted to make up for lost time and take advantage of second chances, and Javier was eager to see an ocean he’d never dived in.

Javier was born and raised in Cuba. We met in Jamaica, where we enjoyed lots of time snorkeling on the reefs in front of his apartment together in the waters off Negril. Like many a keen diver’s reluctant partner has surely done, he eventually got certified “for me.” But we’d only actually donned tanks together a few times in Florida and Mexico before his accident, and he was hardly hooked on the sport.

On our first dive in Rangiroa in the Tuamotu Archipelago, I couldn’t wait for my Caribbean boy to see Tiputa Pass and its many sharks, dolphins and Indo-Pacific denizens like Napoleon wrasse. But before Javier had even descended 5 feet, he rocketed back to the surface, called the dive and swapped his regulator for a snorkel. He couldn’t equalize, he said, but later admitted to having some PTSD after all he’d been through. Things went that way on our next stop in Tikehau, where he missed diving with mantas. I tried to make him feel better by saying snorkeling was probably just as good.

It was hard not to be disappointed. I wanted Javier to experience the underwater world in one of my favorite places on Earth—and fall in love with the sport.

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In Fakarava, I got my wish. Javier got his groove back at one of the most epic sites—the atoll’s South Pass, Tumakohua, where a patient instructor (far more patient than any wife) managed to calm his nerves, teach him some tricks for equalizing and guide him down to see the legendary wall of gray reef sharks and the most thrilling underwater views.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen my husband’s eyes so wide. When we surfaced, he was buoyed with renewed confidence that propelled him through the rest of the week. “You were wrong, though,” he later told me. “Snorkeling isn’t the same.”

I couldn’t have been happier to have my dive buddy back.