The husband pretends to get decompression sickness as a result of a 160 foot wreck dive.....he can either pretend to have a low on air situation, this causing him to ascend without sufficient decompression stop time--thus causing the DCS..or, he can do the dive properly, and then claim to suffer serious DCS and paralysis --this would be from what is referred to as an "Undeserved Hit"...one that is not really explainable, but that does happen with statistical probability in a population of divers.
You may want him to do the deep dive, and to stay down too long...this could be him acting in a RECKLESS MANNER, showing the world ( the wife) that he does not care about life any longer, and the near out of air incident, precipitating the fast ascent and missed decompression stops would make a good story for the wife to consider--and perhaps see that the husband does see her as his whole world....
The fast ascent could be faked easily enough--he could just tell people this...or, if you want more inventive, he could dive with 2 computers, and send one up on a float and line, at reel that computer up to the surface at too fast a pace--one that would look like a severe case of DCS would obviously result from such a rapid ascent, with missed stops....Of course, he would have used his spare computer to do a safe ascent.
Later, he fakes paralysis, and needs to be taken care of between chamber treatments.....He can be afraid of dying now, as he sees his wife really does care about him....
Then, when you want to build the discovery into the story, he can be found dancing around or doing something that would have annoyed the wife in the old days, before all of this....before he turned over this new leaf....he can dance around, because the paralysis was never real.
If you want, there could be an early hospital visit where a neurologist tests him for feeling in his legs, but he will have injected some pufferfish toxin into his legs, and it has paralyzed his muscles.......there actually would be a
marine life based
paralytic which could be used exactly this way....and there are a few MD's on this board that could provide exact details
How's this?