JJ Devine was swimming at a Mount Maunganui beach last month when he passed out. He was rescued and revived by strangers, and later identified by a photo of his beach towel. After an unexpectedly short stay in hospital, he is well on the road to recovery. All he recalls
Mount Maunganui swimmer describes out-of-body experience after nearly drowning
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"I kind of saw my life kind of like a movie or like a photo album ... like a bunch of memories that I could flick through. A lot of them were based on when I was a kid.
"And then I woke up back on the beach ... I thought my family was around me but it was actually a group of strangers."
On January 8, JJ was swimming alone at Mount Maunganui's Omanu Beach when he had an epileptic seizure and passed out. JJ has had epilepsy since he was 12.
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He was found face-down in the surf by a young couple, who dragged him to shore with the help of other beachgoers.
The group, including an off-duty lifeguard, performed CPR and managed to resuscitate him.
JJ was taken to hospital by ambulance, identity unknown.
His mum only found out after police posted a photo of his beach towel on social media in the hopes of identifying him.
JJ's parents were told he would spend one to two months in ICU due to brain damage and memory loss, but he was moved into a ward five days after the incident, and discharged home a few days after that.
A week later, he was surfing again, and now he's eyeing a return to work.
JJ said the first few weeks after the drowning were hard.
"I don't really remember much but that was part of the problem - just not remembering things.
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"In the last couple weeks I've just felt a bit more like myself and that's when I've been ready to make the call that I can go back to my normal routine."
JJ says his experience has made him feel less afraid and "more ready to take challenges".
He hopes to go to America, where his family lived for nine years when he was a child.
To the people involved in his rescue, JJ said: "It's just incredible what they did. I couldn't thank them enough really. They saved my life."
JJ's mother, Colette Orringe, was scrolling Facebook when she saw a photo of her son's Rip
Curl beach towel, posted by police seeking to identify a person found unresponsive in the water.
She and JJ's father, James Devine, went to the hospital that night.
"We were told pretty much 'go home, there's nothing you can do', praying he survives the night."
The next day, after hearing from the doctor that JJ was "unresponsive", Colette said she and James feared "real long-term effects" such as permanent brain damage and memory loss.
She said she was told JJ had post-traumatic amnesia and would be in ICU for one to two months.
His tests for the condition scored "really low, he didn't know much at all", she said.
"Then he just got better and better ... he just progressed beyond their imaginations and just blew us all away with his recovery."
Colette said JJ's survival showed "he's certainly got a purpose here".
"There's a reason that he was saved, there was a reason he came back, there was a reason all those people were there at that right time, there's a reason that his brain cleared so quickly."
The rescuers' stories
Holidaymakers Sophie Hobbs and Tim Neild were swimming when she glimpsed "something in the waves".
The 21-year-old told her partner: "That's a person."
Tim went over to JJ, and looked back at Sophie.
"I just knew that it was a person - my heart sank into my stomach."
After calling out to her mother, Suzanne Hobbs, to call 111, Tim and Sophie started pulling JJ out of the water unconscious.
"The scariest part ... was we didn't know how long he'd been in there for. He was face-down in the water," she said.
"His hands and his feet were both purple.
"I think every single person on the beach that day was important to the fact that he survived."
Mount Maunganui resident Helen Maxey was at the beach for her birthday when she heard Sophie and Tim calling out.
Helen, her partner Jon Tate, friend Sarah O'Hagan and neighbour Nick Devcich ran over and helped pull JJ from the water.
"He was completely unresponsive."
Helen was a lifeguard in the UK and did first-aid training as a teacher. She and
Sarah started CPR, while Nick checked for a pulse.
"He was completely full of water and every time we did a cycle he was expelling more water," Helen said.
An off-duty lifeguard came and took over from Sarah with compressions while Helen continued mouth-to-mouth. Eventually, Nick detected a pulse and JJ started breathing.
A nurse came over and ensured his airway was open, before paramedics arrived and took over.
"I remember at the time just thinking ... if it was your son, you'd want to know someone was doing something for him," Helen said.
"I think it must just be a human response to want to make sure someone continues to live."
She said it was "an incredible story of survival".
The lifeguard, 16-year-old Luca Olsen, was on a family holiday from Wellington.
He was heading back after a surf when he saw a body being pulled from the water and ran over.
Reaching the group, Luca checked for a heartbeat and to see if JJ was breathing, which he wasn't.
"I started CPR and during that we managed to get ... close to three cups of water out of his lungs."
Luca said he gave him compressions for about five minutes while another person did mouth-to-mouth.
After JJ started breathing again, they rolled him into the recovery position and waited for the ambulance.
Luca said it felt "pretty good" to have helped save a life and it had given him more confidence as a lifeguard.
"I do a lot of mountain biking and a lot of surfing ... I know if anything goes wrong, I feel like I can trust myself a bit more."
Near-death experiences - how common are they?
Massey University associate professor in the school of psychology Natasha Tassell-Matamua has been researching near-death experiences for more than a decade. She has also had a near-death experience herself.
She said JJ's story had a lot of features of what would be considered a near-death experience.
"The disembodiment, the sense of leaving the body and floating up, seeing light, seeing other beings.
"It sounds like he had the flipping through memories - that's what would be considered a life review.
"The choice to come back or to continue is … well-known features of what people report when they've had a near-death experience."
Tassell-Matamua said it was hard to say how common near-death experiences were.
Some studies have suggested as many as 20 per cent of those who have died and been resuscitated have reported some sort of "near-death" psychological experience, whereas others put the figure at around 9 per cent, she said.
She said there were numerous theories about why they occurred.
"We don't know what causes them - they just seem to happen and happen in a similar way for many people."
In her own near-death experience, the result of illness in her late teens, she recalled "travelling through what appeared to be a tunnel towards a really bright light, and in that light there was a silhouette of what appeared to be a being".
"I just communicated with the being, but it wasn't verbal. It was more ... a telepathic sort of communication just saying I'm not ready yet.
"After that I was propelled back down the tunnel and back into my body."
When she woke, she felt like it was "the most real thing that had ever occurred in my life".
