Dancing in the Sea is the beautifully written and moving account of Catherine Hill’s horrific experience of a hijack, after which she was left permanently disabled. In 1986, when she was 26, Catherine and her Italian boyfriend Picci went travelling through India. On their journey home, their Pan Am flight from Bombay to Germany was hijacked when it landed in Pakistan to pick up additional passengers. PLO terrorists took over the aircraft and the hostages endured nearly 17 hours of terror. Convinced that Pakistani troops were about to try and rescue the hostages, the terrorists finally forced as many people as possible into the aisles and attempted to massacre them. In the slaughter that followed, 21 people died and more than 100 were injured. Catherine was near-fatally wounded, her left buttock blown off by a grenade. In spite of his own injuries, Picci saved her life by dragging her, bleeding heavily, from the plane. Over the years that followed, Catherine endured a series of over 20 horrendous operations as surgeons attempted to heal her mutilated body. During that time, she also began to fight two major lawsuits, one against Pan Am and another that resulted from medical negligence. She had to call on every resource she had - physical, psychological, emotional and financial - as she attempted to rebuild her life. It was after the conclusion of her legal battles, however, that Catherine found herself facing her greatest challenge so far, as she became engulfed by depression when she slowly realised that nothing would ever be the same again. The title, Dancing in the Sea, refers to an epiphany Catherine experienced while on holiday in the Caribbean after the conclusion of her case against Pan Am. It was there that she and Picci danced together for the first time since the hijack, and there that Catherine realised that with imagination she could discover new ways of doing things she had thought impossible due to her physical difficulties. On this holiday, she picked up a pencil and began to write her remarkable story.
