Health Risks of Artistic Swimming

I guess people imagine as an artistic swimmer that I must be super healthy with the only risk being that of damaging my brain cells from breath holding. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

As an artistic swimmer, I am prone to frequent sinus infections, retina and eye problems, and risk of brain inflammation.

Basically my sinus issue is an immediate measure of how strong my immune system is - it’s that chronic a problem with me. This last shoot was pushing my weak limits and I’ve been off for a few days with every problem coming to bite my ass - as usual. Hence the quiet on the posting side as I’ve been spending efforts alone without social media to calm and recover again. (Usually stronger as a result).

After this particular swim my sinus went into catastrophe mode and kept me sleepless for one night. But I bounced back from that rather quickly which was the best sign of my improving health. However it did serve as a warning to me that my health still has a long way to go after suffering with Covid. My immune system is prone to overreacting at the slightest pathogen.

My pool was confirmed to have an infection in the pitted plaster of some kind of bacteria algae or fungus. It has to be drained, acid washed and repainted with reservoir paint to extend its life for another 2 years before re-plastering. I thought I would leave this job until winter.

I‘m pretty sure my sinus infection was something nefarious from the pool. It was chlorinated only the day before to bring up the water clarity. And I knew going in there was a risk to open eyes work.

The risk to my open eyes work is probably the greatest. I have suffered blindness for three days once when I burned my cornea from open eye work. I visited the ophthalmologist and he informed me that I was lucky it didn’t affect my retina. Open eyes underwater is actually an extremely high risk of permanent damage to the eyes, due to the refraction of hot sunlight through the water like a magnifying glass - it flashes into the eye and only a few moments of these white hot moments burns all the focal anatomy of the eyes.

Basically - I take a risk whenever there is direct sunlight on the pool. This is why I chose my lighting windows framed by the dappled shade of the trees at either 10 in the morning or 4pm like this shoot. The sun is low and refracted through the water with lower risk to damaging my eyesight.

But I didn’t escape that damage this weekend. About an hour after the shoot my eyesight started to halo with refraction and abherration - affecting a tunnel around my central vision. It’s scary, because I don’t know whether this is going to be a permanent affect. The first time it happened to me I saw rainbows in my vision for three days.

This time, my retina was affected and my vision rippling like looking through water. This is really scary as I knew my retina had been affected and there was inflammatory fluids starting to affect the eye. The effect faded after a ten minutes but it was a big warning! I need to wear mirrored goggles for the mean time as open eyes can be sunlight burned even in low angle direct sunlight. The crazy thing is the ripples above refract bands of concentrated hot sunlight that still have the power to burn my eyesight.

I‘m looking to buy myself some underwater lighting to protect myself from the risk of doing direct sunlight shoots. Unfortunately with the assault to my sinuses, and the inflammation in the eyes, my immune system (still sensitive from covid) decided to fog my brain again. I’ve been suffering with my myalgic encephalopathy again for a few days.

Myalgic Encephalopathy is a chronic condition in which inflammation on the brain erodes normal regulation and it causes me to fall asleep. Literally, I can’t stay awake. My brain shuts me down to heal itself.

So I’ve taken a few days off since this last shoot I’m deep recovery mode. I fought off the infection in 24 hours, but the inflammation on my brain usually takes 3 days to pass. Usually if I manage this condition well, I can improve my mental function. But these last few days have been challenging - I felt myself go backwards in muting again, difficulties with speech are on of the first symptoms of my sensitive brain.

In the past 20 months I have made a huge recovery from multiple seizures and cognitive loss - to the point where I could not recognize myself or function in daily life. I lost my speech and could only remember infantile German. Now I’m much much improved - near normal actually. But the covid attacked me where I was weakest, and the inflammation on my brain is a weary battle I face daily. Swimming heals me, but I have to balance it and daily training has to be balanced to prevent inflammation levels rising again.