On Catalina Island, a Resilient Swimmer Finds Freedom in Open Water

This story contains references to eating disorders and self-harm.

Suzy Degazon moved to Santa Catalina Island because she wanted to be a fish. Most days, you can indeed find her in the ocean near Dive Park, either going for a morning swim at the surface or giving scuba diving tours of the kelp forest below. Often she does both.

Today, Degazon’s Instagram is overflowing with open water joy, but there was a time when she was too sick to walk, much less swim. To make it to Catalina, she first had to overcome a life-threatening eating disorder.

Degazon grew up in the English countryside, helping her parents manage a small hotel. She liked cooking with her mom, and she was good at it. When she was eight years old, she won a contest for a cake she made.

“I was just always going to be a pastry chef,” Degazon said.

Then she got sick. It started gradually when she was fifteen. She describes herself as a “wild child.” In school, teachers said she didn’t listen or pay attention. As a teenager, she went to AC/DC and Motörhead concerts. Degazon felt like she’d lost control of her life, so she began to avoid eating because it was the one thing she could control.

None of this stopped her passion for baking. She went to pastry school and then moved to London. She worked in the noisy, fast-paced kitchen of a five-star hotel, making strawberry tartlets, chocolate eclairs, crème brûlées — if it had pastry in it, she made it. But she didn’t eat it.

She said she didn’t even feel hungry. “When you get dangerously thin with anorexia, you don’t know it,” Degazon said. “You’re in denial.”

One day, the police stopped her on the street and put her in a hospital for her own safety. She weighed 58 pounds.

“I couldn’t even stand up,” Degazon said. “I was really frail. I was on bed rest.”

Degazon had to stay in the hospital for a number of weeks. If the nurses gave her food, she’d hide it and flush it down the toilet. She had a sink in her room, and they replaced the drain pipe with a bucket.

In order to leave, Degazon had to put on weight, which Degazon said didn’t work long-term.

“You just eat, you get [to 80 pounds], you get out, and back you go,” Degazon said. “You have to fix up your noggin to get any help, really.”

Degazon cycled in and out of the hospital so many times that eventually a doctor told her family she would probably die.

One time, when she was in a hospital in York, she turned on the TV and saw people running a marathon.

“I remember telling the nurse, I want to be like that one day. I’m going to do a marathon,” Degazon recalled. “And the nurse turned around to me and said, ‘You can’t even run to the toilet.’”

After ten years, Degazon and her family needed a new solution to help her get better. Her grandfather suggested she go backpacking in Southeast Asia, like her brother had. Maybe that would help her break the cycle. So Degazon got her weight up to 80 pounds — enough to leave the hospital — and bought a ticket to Bangkok.

“I looked like a walking stick insect,” Degazon said. “But I was going to see the world. And I did.”

The freedom suited Degazon. No one called her names or nagged her about whether she was eating enough.

As she traveled, little things started to change. For example, in Singapore, she was with a group of people who were all buying doughnuts. Previously, Degazon would have avoided buying a doughnut or thrown the doughnut away as soon as possible.

This time, Degazon did something different. “We’re in [the doughnut shop] and I’m like, ‘I want to be normal. I’m going to eat a doughnut!’” She starts to nibble the doughnut, but it’s too much for her to eat it all at once, so she puts it in her pocket. She said it took her a whole week to eat it. “I didn’t throw it away. It was pretty stale at the end, but I ate that whole donut,” Degazon said. “I felt proud that I did that.”

Degazon kept traveling. In the Maldives, she learned to scuba dive. On her first time down, the instructor told her to squeeze her hand when she wanted to go back up.

Suzy never squeezed the instructor’s hand. “I just wanted to stay down there forever,” she said.

In the clear water of the Maldives, she saw turtles and tropical fish. She was captivated and also empowered. Visiting unfamiliar countries and underwater habitats gave her that control, that responsibility for herself, that she craved. She also fell in love with the ocean and decided to visit the Caribbean Islands.

She was in Boquerón, Puerto Rico, when her transformation became clear. At first, she’d started running to rebuild her bone density. Soon, she was swimming in the ocean each day with more experienced friends. Then someone lent her a bicycle. “The next thing I know, I’m a triathlete,” Degazon said. “So I did a triple Ironman in France.”

The run alone is three marathons in a row. Degazon trained hard, but she also had a secret weapon: she knew how to break something big into little bites.

Degazon lived in Puerto Rico for thirteen years, representing the island as an international triathlete and ultraman competitor before many women were even doing Ironmans. In 1994, Suzy competed in the Sonoma Vineman, one of the first Ironmans in California. In 1997, she won 3rd place at Le Défi Mondial de l’Endurance in France. She earned sponsors and was on billboards across Puerto Rico.

Most of all, Degazon figured out how to channel her obsessive-compulsive eating habits into a love for sports — sports that taught her to take care of her body, and keep it fueled.

But starving herself for ten years also caused irreversible damage to her body, including to her inner ear and auditory nerve. When Degazon applied for a work visa that required a medical exam, she received her first diagnosis of hearing loss.

It was a complete surprise. Looking back now, she suspects she’d had hearing loss her whole life. “But,” she added quickly, “I’ve never let that stop me!”

Degazon got hearing aids and moved forward. Eventually, she set her sights on California. She moved to LA to marry her soulmate, and then moved to Santa Catalina Island to teach scuba diving. Now she relishes the chance to show visitors the strange and wonderful creatures living in Catalina’s kelp forests, like the bright orange Garibaldi, the official marine state fish of California.

“Having anorexia was really bad, and so I always want to be alive,” Degazon said. “I want to live every day like it’s my last day.”

On a clear morning, Degazon barely got out of the water before she started passionately describing what she saw: big sheep crabs and abalone everywhere.

Then, spotting a pod of sea lions swimming close to shore, she jumped back in the water to get a closer look. It was barely 8 a.m., and it was already a good day to be alive.