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Decompression Illness

by Philip Greenspun

Some things that I learned the hard way about decompression illness ("DCI", "DCS", or "the bends"):

  • 85% of people treated for decompression illness were diving within limits imposed by tables or a dive computer (i.e., most people struck by DCI are following the rules)
  • the symptoms of DCI as described in PADI and SSI SCUBA instruction are not a complete list
  • partly because of confusion over symptoms, most people who get DCI are never properly diagnosed or treated
  • a liveaboard dive cruise can significantly increase your chance of getting DCI, makes proper diagnosis less likely, and may delay treatment

Here then is my decompression illness story.

I'm a novice diver, certified with 5 beach dives in Hawaii in 1991 topped up with 11 dives in three days from a liveaboard out of Cairns, Australia in 1992 (see http://www.photo.net/nz/australia) and two more dives in the Caymans in 1994. During those 18 dives, I'd never had any problems of any kind. I never considered myself at any risk of the bends because I tend to consume air rapidly.

Following six years glued to the keyboard, in August 2000, I went out for a 6-day cruise to the Coral Sea out of Townsville, Australia with Mike Ball Dive Expeditions ( www.mikeball.com). There were 19 other divers on the boat. Every one of these 19 people did more dives, longer dives, and deeper dives than I did. Yet I got ill and they did not. Mike Ball requires and supplies dive computers. I used one throughout this trip. At all times the computer showed that I had ample time remaining at my current depth for a no decompression stop ascent.

I felt pretty bad during much of the trip. We started off with a 10-hour drive through rough seas. Even with a Scopalamine patch on, I felt a bit seasick. Several other passengers and crew were vomiting. Few people reporting having slept well. Keep in mind that dive boats aren't luxurious floating cities like the Love Boat. We were on Spoilsport, which is considered Australia's finest liveaboard, staying in a "premium" cabin, and yet the noise of the engines when moving is thunderous. The hull of a powerboat acts as a resonator for all the diesel engine noise and, even if you're wearing earplugs, you might have a tough time sleeping from the noise of the engines alone. This night we had the noise plus the seas were rough enough that we were actually pitched up into the air from the mattress regularly.

Bottom line is that I was a bit tired on the first day of diving but felt good because I wasn't actually green and vomiting like some of the other passengers. While equalizing on the second dive (out of 24 possible), I bruised my right eardrum a bit. Upon visiting a doctor following my return, I learned that I had a wax buildup in this ear and that was probably why it was tough to equalize. Lesson: Get a dive medical or at least a regular physical before any new collection of SCUBA dives.

By the second day my ear felt better and I enjoyed three dives to about 17-18 meters. After three or four days I found that I was unable to read with my eyeglasses on. I'm nearsighted but normally I read with my glasses. One of the precautions against taking scopalamine is for people with glaucoma so I figured that this was a side effect of the patch, though I'd used these patches 10 or 15 times before with no such effect. Early in the morning on the fifth day of the trip, I had a really bad headache, I felt pressure behind my eyes, and my right arm ached as though I'd had a tetanus shot in the biceps. Was it from the three dives the day before (23m, total bottom time 27 minutes; 20m, 28 min; 17m, 25 min; all multilevel dives)? Headache is not listed as one of the symptoms of DCI in the PADI and SSI books. Or was the headache from the scopalamine patch? And the arm ache a result of a crewman opening a door into my elbow the day before? Jason, the captain, put me on 100% oxygen as a precaution. This is the traditional first-aid given to DCI sufferers. The oxygen did not give me any relief and the Mike Ball staff said that was a sign against it being DCI since a DCI sufferer will usually feel better after 30 minutes of oxygen. Jason also telephoned the hyperbaric chamber at Townsville General Hospital and spoke with a technician there. It was the judgement of the tech that my symptoms could best be accounted for by the scopalamine and the elbow whack. A helicopter ride and treatment in the chamber seemed unnecessary.

I took the scopalamine patch off. The arm ache cleared by mid-morning. My headache cleared by the afternoon. Talking to the crew and the other passengers reassured me. All of them had convinced themselves that they'd gotten bent. They'd felt or imagined twinges and were sure that they needed hyperbaric treatment. But in every case it turned out that they were simply paranoid. There are 1 million people diving every year in Queensland and only 120 are treated in Townsville's hyperbaric chamber. 1 chance in 10,000!

I did a dive to 14 meters for 40 minutes to watch a shark feed and then did a 40-minute multilevel night dive, to a max depth of 14 meters. I suffered from some stress and fatigue at the end of the night dive, however, as we overshot the boat and there was a strong current flowing away from the deco bar. Mike Ball had buddied me up with Kevin, a volunteer divemaster, who'd done about 60 dives before this trip. He saved my butt by helping me fin back to the boat. Some rough times were predicted so I took an English seasickness remedy, Sturgerol, from another diver.

Overnight we drove through rough seas for 10 hours to get to the wreck of the Yongala, a coastal steamer that sank 12 miles off the coast of Queensland in 1911 with 120 lives lost. This is considered one of the world's best wreck dives. However, conditions in the morning were challenging. Few had gotten a good night's sleep. The noise of the engines and the rough water, nearly as bad as the first night's sail out, was enough to wake almost anyone. There was a substantial surface swell, the sky was intermittently gray, and we had reports of a strong current down on the wreck.

One of the good things about diving with a first class outfit like Mike Ball is that they spend a lot of time preparing the site. They dropped two lines to the wreck, one on the stern and one on the bow. So it would be possible to descend and ascend on the lines, important for doing the decompression stops that Mike Ball insisted on even if the computers did not. At the bottom of each line, in about 15 meters of water, the Mike Ball crew had left a spare SCUBA tank and regulator for anyone who was low on air. If you came up on the far line you could just raise your hand to get picked up by a Zodiac rather than pull your way back to the boat.

I was buddied with my girlfriend Eve Andersson, who'd done her open water certification dives on board the Spoilsport. We asked for help from the crew and they sent Kevin, the volunteer divemaster, with us again. My plan was to descend on the line nearest the boat, drift with the current to the second line, then ascend to the surface and ask for a Zodiac pickup. Short, sweet, no finning against the current. I let Kevin overrule me. Pointing to the crashing up and down of the Spoilsport, he said that it was tough to get back onto the boat from the Zodiac and we'd be better off just staying in the neighborhood of the first line and coming back up.

We executed a modified version of Kevin's plan. The current took us fairly quickly all the way to the other end of the boat. Then we proceeded to swim back. I watched my tank pressure gauge drop from 140 bar to 40 sickeningly fast. We were back on the first line but rather than grab the spare tank, Kevin had me breathe from his octopus regulator. He still had more than 100 bar (Lesson: be in really good shape before a challenging dive and work out with your fins doing a bunch of snorkeling.). We did the safety stops with me breathing from his octopus but it wasn't much fun because something about the arrangement kept flooding my mask. We did a 2-minute stop at 10 meters and a 3-minute stop at 5 meters and then ascended. I went back on my own tank to pull myself back to the boat along a surface line. The waves were too rough for me to feel that I could snorkel comfortably so I stayed with the regulator and watched the pressure drop from 30 to less than 10 bar. Just like it says in the books, it became a bit tougher to draw breath. I made it back to the boat but couldn't get on immediately. The swell was causing Spoilsport to crash up and down hard enough to crack anyone's head open. So the crew was on the dive platform telling divers exactly when to approach. I got on with maybe one more breath left in my tank.

There are a whole lot of lessons to be learned from the preceding. One is probably to be more assertive about insisting on an easier dive plan. Second is to not be shy to grab the spare air tank. Third is to wait for a better day (as it happened the second dive that morning on the Yongala had much reduced surface swell and hardly any current).

The PADI and SSI books don't list being scared as a contributing factor to DCI. But they do list "fatigue" and "vigorous exertion". "Weakness" is also listed as a symptom of DCI. So it is possible that I had trouble finning against the current on the Yongala dive because of DCI picked up from previous dives and that the effort of the dive itself made the DCI worse. The poor night's sleep wouldn't have helped either. My profile on the dive was reasonable. I was down at 26 meters only for about 5 minutes then mostly up around 17 meters. My total bottom time would have been about 20 minutes. It was a no-decompression dive by the PADI tables and the dive computer certainly gave me ample margin.

That said, after the Yongala dive, I was finished. I was exhausted and collapsed on my bunk. A terrible headache developed within half an hour and I tried some oxygen (the tank was still in our cabin). I felt a little bit better towards the afternoon as we drove back towards Townsville and managed to come up on deck to gaze out at the horizon. When I got off the boat at 4:00 pm, I was dizzy and had a headache. So I hopped in a taxi to a local dive physician's office and presented my symptoms. His diagnosis:

  1. based on a wax buildup in my right ear, it looked like I'd had a minor ear infection
  2. the pressure of diving had pushed the infection into my sinuses and that was the cause of the headache
  3. the other symptoms were side effects from scopalamine

I was put on a course of antibiotics and sent back to the hotel.

Facing the Music

It was 8:00 am. Twenty four hours after my last dive and three hours before the first of a series of flights that would carry me back to the US, ending my three-week sojourn in Australia. My headache was terrible and I was a bit lightheaded. Not as dizzy as the previous afternoon but it seemed like a reasonable precaution to visit the hyperbaric medicine department at Townsville General Hospital. They were very polite and organized on the phone and agreed to see me immediately at 9:00 so that I could get cleared and proceed direct to the airport for my 11:00 am flight.

Dr. Webb was on duty. He's an anesthesiologist normally but was filling in for the head of hyperbaric medicine. He listened to my report. He tested my balance by making me stand with one foot in front of the other, clasping my hands to opposite shoulders, closing my eyes and seeing how long it took me to topple over (15 seconds; 60 is normal). He tested the comparative sensation in left and right sides using light touch with cotton balls, sharp and dull needles, and cold versus not-cold objects. My right hand was considerably less sensitive than the left one. He tested my mental abilities by timing me count backward by 7s from 100 and by asking me to remember a sentence.

Dr. Webb offered no opinions until the end of the consultation: "You have decompression illness and need treatment in the hyperbaric chamber."

I struggled against this diagnosis as best as my fogged mind could. I cited the fact that my diving was within the limits of the computer. Dr. Webb pulled out a very conservative set of dive tables from a Canadian organization and noted that it recommended longer decompression stops for a 28-minute dive to 26 meters. He put little faith in dive computers, saying that they were based on animal studies. In any case, he'd had patients who got DCI in swimming pools or on their open water certification dives. Headache wasn't on the list of common DCI symptoms. He said that the entire recreational diving industry was deeply confused about what was and what was not a symptom of DCI. In fact, headache and flu-like symptoms were fairly common. Because they aren't listed, a lot of divers get DCI and wrongly attribute it to the flu. I asked him to consider the possibilities that all of my symptoms were explained by a sinus infection or Scopalamine. Finally he crushed my resistance by saying "You don't feel right, do you?"

The chamber was in use that morning for a scheduled 1.5-hour "dive" to benefit wound patients. This is the main use of hyperbaric facilities worldwide. If a wound is poorly supplied with blood, most typically because the patient is diabetic, 30 treatments with pressure and 100% oxygen often help. Divers with DCI are treated initially with a 5-hour "dive" and that was scheduled for 1:00 pm.

During the rest of the morning I found out some more unpleasant facts about DCI. I would be forbidden to fly in a commercial aircraft for three weeks following my last treatment. I tried to make the best of this. I would drive or take the train down to Sydney and work from the bosom of the University of New South Wales's excellent computer science department. Wrong! There was a series of 200-meter high hills between Brisbane and Sydney and the road or train would keep me up there for a total of 20 minutes. That might bring back all the DCI symptoms as the nitrogen bubbles expanded further. I could go north to Cairns or south to Brisbane but not inland or south to Sydney. I couldn't do anything too rugged in this rugged part of Australia, though, because strenuous exercise was forbidden for at least two weeks following the final treatment. Alcohol was prominently restricted as well, something you might expect when there is a huge drive-through liquor store just half a block from the hospital, but I'm not a drinker normally so I wasn't upset about that.

Into the Chamber

Digital photo titled philip-entering-hyperbaric-chamber The basic theory behind DCI is that your body has respired out most of your excess nitrogen. However, it didn't get rid of enough of it quickly enough. The residual nitrogen formed itself into bubbles too large to diffuse through blood and tissues. The objective of recompression is to squeeze the bubbles down small enough that they can diffuse through tissue again. To encourage those bubbles to diffuse out through your lungs, you breathe 100% oxygen in the chamber. I.e., there is no nitrogen in your airways and at least some nitrogen in your tissues. So the diffusion of the nitrogen will all point up and out of your mouth.

Recompression and oxygen is not 100% effective, however. If a bubble is really big it might not be compressed down small enough in the 18m of pressure that you get (they can't bring you down lower because otherwise the oxygen becomes toxic). If a bubble has become coated with protein, it may be more tenacious than a regular bubble and persist. This is why it will take some weeks following treatment for maximum recovery.

Some people get what Dr. Webb called a "fit" from the pure oxygen under pressure. So they stick an IV in you before the first long dive and the treatments are done with one nurse in the chamber and one nurse outside the chamber with the technician. If there is an adverse reaction to the oxygen, they can easily pump drugs into your system to revive you.

During most of the first treatment, I just lay down on the bed, opposite Mardi, one of the nurses. I did a bit of reading towards the end and found that my concentration was considerably improved compared with the morning.

The rest of the week

Digital photo titled hyperbaric-staff Each day for the rest of the week, I would get evaluated in the morning by Dr. David Griffiths, the head of hyperbaric medicine. He tested my pulse, my temperature, my blood, and X-rayed my sinuses to rule out the possibility that some of my symptoms were explained by an infection (all tests were negative). My headaches were slowly getting better and, by the morning of the fourth treatment, I was able to balance for 60 seconds. Hanging around the unit, I learned more about DCI. One patient's had no symptoms other than a personality change: "He became a complete arsehole," said one of the nurses. Over a three month period, this diver lost his wife, his kids, and his job. Even after three months, hyperbaric treatment partially restored his former personality.


Digital photo titled hyperbaric-chamber Townsville is a pleasant place and after three treatments I was able to visit the Billabong Sanctuary, where you can cuddle a koala, hold a python, watch the staff almost hand-feed huge crocodiles, pet kangaroos, and be walked on by Australian parrots. After my fourth treatment I was able to take a ferry out to Magnetic Island and poke around a bit. But basically I was an invalid and this was the sanitorium life a la Mann's Magic Mountain. I had the worst headaches of my life, was worn out and tired from just getting up and walking two blocks to the hospital, and felt like I would never get better. It is extremely depressing. I was only able to get by day to day because my girlfriend Eve rearranged her life and stayed with me for the week of treatment.

The Future (for me)

I'm back to work officially, remotely supervising some projects back at ArsDigita. I've rented a car and am trying to drive down to Brisbane to give a couple of lectures at the university. Eventually I will make it down to UNSW in Sydney and then home. Dr. Griffiths tells me that I might be headache-free in a week and that I can hope for a complete recovery though it sure seems hard to believe right now.

Liveaboards and Decompression Illness

I built my Web site in order to share what I've learned in the hopes that it would be useful to others. So here is something I think that I've learned about liveaboard diving boats: a liveaboard dive cruise is a great way to get DCI. On a liveaboard trip, there is nothing to do except dive. You will be doing more dives per day than if you were at a beach resort with other options.

Liveaboards tend to move at night. Smallish power boats are extremely noisy. If you are a light sleeper, you won't get much sleep. Fatigue puts you at increased risk of DCI according to the PADI and SSI books. Even more of a problem is that if you are tired after a dive you won't know whether it is due to the sleepless night or the dive itself. Do you have DCI or did you just sleep poorly?

If you've any tendency toward seasickness, you may have some problems. If you actually get sick you'll be dehydrated and that puts you at increased risk for DCI. If you take medication and then feel odd at some point in the trip, you won't know whether the discomfort is a side effect of the medication or related to your dive.

One of the best tests for DCI is the balance test that I had every day in Townsville General Hospital. I think you should test yourself at home to establish a baseline and then on every dive day. If you're on a liveaboard dive boat, you'll never know whether or not an inability to balance is due to the rocking of the boat or a case of DCI.

Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO)

Before taking up SCUBA, it might be worth getting tested by a cardiologist for Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO). The procedure takes about one hour. Depending on whom you ask, PFO afflicts 5-15 percent of the population and increases the risk of DCI by a factor of three. PFO is a disqualifying condition for U.S. Navy divers.

I asked a cardiologist friend to explain this and here is what she said:

A Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO) is a small hole between the right upper chamber of the heart (right atrium) and the left upper chamber of the heart (left atrium). It is covered by a flap of tissue on the right side of the heart so that there is not usually continuous flow. It is a vestigial structure from embryonic development. In the developing fetus, oxygenated blood comes from the mother via the umbilical cord into the venous system of the fetus. In order for the tissues to get adequate oxygen, the blood is shunted from the right atrium (venous side) to the left atrium (arterial side) via the foramen ovale. At birth with the first breath, the abrupt pressure change closes the foramen ovale. However, in 10-15% of the population, this hole does not completely close.

A PFO is diagnosed by a cardiac echocardiogram which is an ultrasound of the heart. Rarely can blood flow be seen across the PFO as it is usually too small, so agitated saline bubbles are injected through an IV catheter in the arm and these tiny bubbles can be seen crossing the PFO on the echocardiogram. There is no risk to the patient with this test.

The majority of people will never know they have a PFO as there are usually no medical consequences. They are at slightly higher risk for having a stroke compared to the general population, but there are no preventative steps taken unless a stroke happens. There may also be an associated with migraines. Current studies are being conducted to determine if closing the PFO with a small closure device will make a difference in these patients.

The one group of patients where a PFO might make a difference is in divers. The danger is in the potential to develop small bubbles in the venous system either during ascension or during decompression. These small bubbles can cross over into the arterial system and cause decompression illness (DCI). It has also been suggested that divers with PFOs can have MRI evidence of multiple brain lesions. Several studies have suggested that divers with DCI have a significantly higher incidence of PFOs than the general population.

If you are a diver with a PFO you should be aware that you are potentially at much higher risk for developing DCI. Some physicians will recommend that you not dive at all. Other recommendations include more conservative dives and certainly no dives that require decompression stops. Also, the newer oxygen-rich gas mixtures [Nitrox] may also help although there is no conclusive data.

After my experience with DCI, I was tested for PFO. The test was negative, i.e., I should have had half the risk of DCI of a person in the general population with an unknown PFO status.

More: http://scuba-doc.com/pfo.htm.

Oh yes, the money

One of the refreshing things about Townsville General Hospital is that they treat the patient first and worry about the money later. It was only after three days that they gently told me that they'd been given the brushoff by Blue Cross when they inquired as to whether my treatment was covered. They made all the phone calls back to the US so that I wouldn't have to be bothered. The total bill was about USD$2500, which I paid by credit card. Lesson: if you're American and want health care, you really do have to be rich, even if you're insured in theory..

More important than the money was the warmth of the staff at Townsville General. They ordered lunch for me the first day without being asked. They anticipated my questions and needs. There were no lengthy bureaucratic waits or procedures. The staff tend to dress casually and don't try to distance themselves from the patients. It sucks to be ill (you can't say "sick" in Australia because it means vomiting) but if you're going to be ill there really isn't a better place than the hyperbaric unit at Townsville General Hospital.

Am I going to dive again?

Dr. Griffiths says that I can SCUBA dive again in six weeks. The people that get DCI on their certification dives are told that diving isn't for them. But there are plenty of people who do hundreds of dives, get DCI randomly, and then go on to do hundreds more dives happily. Do I think I'm prone to DCI? Obviously to some extent. I did not have any of the risk factors mentioned in the SCUBA books except for fatigue. I'm not a drinker. I'm not grossly overweight. I'm not really old (nearly 37). I was careful to drink a lot of fluids throughout my boat trip. On the other hand, I've dived successfully in the past.

Some of the factors in my favor on the 11 dives that I did in 1992:

  • the boat did not move at night so I did not lose sleep and wasn't fatigued (it was an economy trip and we only went to the nearby Barrier Reef rather than way out to the Coral Sea)
  • it was summer and the water was warmer (28 degrees versus 22 or 24 on this trip); being cold in the water is a risk for DCI
  • I kept to shallower repetitive dives because I was using the PADI tables

So if I absolutely had to dive, I'd be willing to risk another full month of hospital treatment, convalescence, and imprisonment in Australia. But who absolutely has to SCUBA dive? Most of the good coral reef sights are within 10 meters of the surface, oftentimes closer to 5 meters. And the shallower they are the more vibrant the colors from sunlight. You can see these sights just floating on the surface with a snorkel and see them well by getting good at free diving (the dive instructors on Spoilsport would regularly free dive down to 15 meters to secure lines and oftentimes to 30 meters or more for fun). I very happily snorkeled a full mile across a bay in Hawaii once and then snorkeled a mile back in the other direction. I saw eagle rays, sea turtles, and a school of dolphins. The beauty of the snorkel is that you can breathe while floating at your natural level. So you can just stop and rest at any time. Still, if you're lazy or out of shape SCUBA is a good crutch for getting below the surface but being out of shape is probably an increased risk for DCI.

SCUBA is essential when you need to remain in a fixed position underwater. If you want to be a great underwater photographer, you'll need to SCUBA dive. To rescue a diver or salvage a sunken item you'll need to SCUBA dive. SCUBA is good when the surface is rough. You can descend to 5 or 10 meters and be out of the surge and also not have to worry about getting water into your snorkel. If you love visiting wrecks (sunken ships), SCUBA is probably going to be required. Most wrecks are fairly deep and most people will have trouble getting good enough at free diving/snorkeling to visit them unaided.

So my plan for future underwater sightseeing is the following:

  • sleep on shore in a nice hotel bed
  • only visit shallow dive sites (stuff worth seeing at 10 meters)
  • only visit those sites on days when the sea is absolutely flat so that I don't get seasick getting out there and so that it is easy to snorkel

An ideal fit to this plan is some kind of tropical lagoon where the hotel room is right on the beach and the reef is swimming distance from the beach. If I were to SCUBA dive, I'd want it to also be under these same conditions. I'd do it once or twice on any given day, using Nitrox (see below) and following the most conservative tables that I could find. It would have to be in a place where I could easily get a medi-jet or helicopter flight out to a decompression chamber (it turns out that any jet interior can be compressed to sea level; they just need to fly somewhat lower (burns more fuel) and compressed the interior harder (also burns more fuel)). If I had to be home by a specific date, that decompression chamber would itself have to be in a place with a road or rail link to my home in Boston.

Lessons

Remember that any dive involves a risk of decompression illness. There is some research that suggests that, based on examination of burst retinal blood vessels, subclinical tissue damage occurs after every SCUBA dive.

  • get a dive medical or at least a regular physical before any new collection of SCUBA dives; you want to establish what your baseline health is and pick up any minor problems such as earwax
  • follow the tables, not a dive computer
  • only dive on days when you feel 100% great; then if you don't feel 100% great when you come out of the water, you'll know why
  • never dive on compressed air, not even for your first five certification dives; unless you're going below 110', it is always safer to breathe Nitrox (36 percent oxygen) -- Nitrox has a reputation for being complex and for being best-suited to advanced divers but unless you desperately need to save $10 per dive it is crazy to use air [I learned to dive when Nitrox was not commonly available and had no idea that it was appropriate for ordinary shallow dives--I almost surely would not have gotten bent and you'd not be reading this article if I'd simply pulled Nitrox bottles off the rack instead of air during my week in Australia]

More

October 2000 Epilogue

It is now two months since I left Townsville General Hospital. I think that I'm just about completely recovered. One of the difficulties in recovery has been that the symptoms of DCI are so varied and subtle. Two weeks after leaving the hospital, I caught what I think was either food poisoning or a stomach flu in New South Wales. I had a headache and was tired. Was it from the bug or a relapse of DCI? It was impossible to say and therefore much more worrying than a normal stomach problem.

The flight back was horrible. I did not get any obvious DCI symptoms but I had terrible stomach and body aches by the time the LA to Boston flight was getting close to landing. After a long weekend in Boston I still had headaches. My doctors at the MIT HMO scheduled a brain MRI. It turned out normal and about a week later the headaches subsided.

Bottom line: about six weeks of pain and terror that my mental processes would be permanently compromised.


Readers' Comments


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Tom Skiba , August 18, 2000; 01:50 P.M.

Phil: Sorry about your troubles with DCI on your trip. I would be interested in follow-up on your experiences with your insurance carrier.

I have been diving off and on for over 20 years and have always carried a supplemental insurance policy with Divers Alert Network (DAN) to cover hyperbaric treatment and related transportation to a chamber in an emergency. They also provide a 24 hour help line if you have questions/problems in the field. More info at: http://www.diversalertnetwork.org

I have never had to utilize their services directly, but those that have speak highly of them...

Get well soon........

Jesse -- , August 19, 2000; 12:34 A.M.

Wow, what a story! I'm sorry that it actually happened, Phil.

I just got certified this year and there was a bit of discussion about things that you mentioned - computers, fatigue, etc., and their contributions. One thing that was emphasized was the role of DAN (as described by Tom above) - the instructor REALLY encouraged becoming a member for the very reasons you have clearly illustrated.

Regarding insurance - I've been advised to contact my insurance carrier prior to any overseas travel (particularly since I'm planning to go abroad for a couple months next year) - apparently health insurance becomes shady once you cross the border. Phil, I know you do lots of traveling -- do you know how much the BCBS-type insurance normally covers (besides of course diving-relating problems)??

Finally, a little note about DCS. It happens coz N2 is very prevalent in the atmosphere (and thus scuba tanks), and is less soluble than O2 in water (blood). More gas is dissolved in fluid when under greater pressures (which is why a bottle of soda fizzes when you open it). When one ascends faster than the body wants, the N2 isn't removed through the lungs fast enough to keep the blood concentration low enough to prevent outgassing (because of it's reduced solubility), which causes the formation of little bubbles which then plug up capillaries (the vascular bed made of the tiniest blood vessels which are in the tissues). Most important is that with these little bubbles, you can block off the blood and nutrient supply to parts of the brain which is what was causing your foggy mind and other neurological symptoms. When you "dive" in the chamber, the bubbles to some extent dissolve again. At this point, you're breathing 100% O2 in an attempt to try to displace (by equilibrium) as much Nitrogen as possible with O2 which is more soluble in the blood. So when you slowly come out of the chamber dive, the slow decompression rate allows a better equilibrium, and the 100% O2 is less likely to outgas. (I hope I got this all right!)

It's interesting that the hyperbaric chamber that you were in was big enough for a nurse as well! I know that the only chamber in this entire region (New England) is here in Boston at the Mass Eye & Ear Institute, and it's apparently a little chamber not much bigger than a coffin!

Anyway, we're wishing you the best with your recovery, and thank you for sharing your experience and lessons! Please do let us know how the insurance stuff resolves.

Robert SIlvers , August 21, 2000; 04:38 P.M.

Consider diving with Nitrox. You have less N so you have more of a safety margin. Use AIR tables with it to be more safe.

bob schalkoff , August 22, 2000; 08:38 A.M.

Sorry to hear about your problem. If you continue diving, DAN insurance is a good idea.

I second the opinion that your diving career may not be over if you consider Nitrox. You can go to 50FSW on EAN36 and have an equivalent air depth (EAD) of 34FSW. Theoretically (DAN will tell you this is approximate and there are exceptions) DCS can't occur unless the N2 gradient is 2:1, which would happen at an EAD of 33FSW.If you are like me, you'll also feel a lot better after the dives.

Hope this helps.

Zibadun -- , August 24, 2000; 03:02 P.M.

I've tried the balance test yesterday in the hotel room and toppled over after about 8 seconds. Are you sure the eyes have to be closed? Am I really dying?

Jesse -- , August 24, 2000; 11:47 P.M.

Vasiliy - It is the norm for healthy young people to be able to stand upright essentially indefinitely (assuming you don't fall asleep) with your eyes closed. Your body uses 3 things for balance - the balance sensors in your inner ear, the "proprioception" sensors which detect joint position, and your vision. People should be able to stay upright with just 2 of those. If you need your eyes to be open to keep your balance, you may have a problem with one of the other 2 components of balance! Would you have problems passing a field sobriety test? There's only one way to find out!!! Now as for dying. . .

Eric Northup , August 25, 2000; 12:32 P.M.

Jesse - you are correct about the senses used to detect balence (or lack of balence). When you stand with one foot in front of the other and your arms on your shoulders, you reduce (significantly) your ability to act on the sense that you are falling. When slightly off-balence, you normally put more weight on one foot or move your arms to compensate. Deprived of these mechanisms by the diabolical test, there is little left but to wiggle your hips. You could also move your shoulders or head from side to side, but that rocks your inner ear, which does more harm than good.

In 4 trials, I was able to stand this way for an average of ~21 seconds. I am 18, and in reasonably good health. I would be quite impressed to see someone balence for 60 seconds in this posture without practice.

Joe Perrigoue , August 30, 2000; 06:58 P.M.

I tried this balance thing and came up with some very odd results. When I place my right foot in front of the left and try not to bend my knees I can last about 40 seconds, if I bend my knees slightly I can do about 80 seconds. When I place my left foot in front of my right and bend my knees slightly I can stay in position indefinitely ( I stayed like this for ~3 min but got bored. I was in no danger of falling soon ). I did play a lot of judo when I was young, that might be a contributing factor.

Marika Buchberger , September 02, 2000; 05:39 A.M.

Get well soon!!!

Michael O'Kane , September 03, 2000; 10:45 P.M.

I'm not sure that the ability to maintain a balance means anything, under either stressful or non-stressful conditions. I do know that I have tried at least ten DUI/DWI cases to a jury, and in each case a roadside sobriety test was administered. That test requires you to close your eyes, put your head back, extend your arms, and then bring touch your nose with your finger, one hand at a time.

You are also required to stand on one leg for fifteen seconds. In each case I won, the first thing the jury did upon entering the jury room for deliberations was to attempt the test. Someone always failed, thus demonstrating that not even a completely sober individual will be able to maintain balance.

Of course, this might simply have been a result of being disoriented due to having to listen to my monotonous harangues

Azur Moulaert , September 05, 2000; 11:21 A.M.

Shallow dive sites are great. That is pretty much all I do and I am perfectly satisfied. If what you want is nature sighting, stay shallow. Try snorkeling and diving in the same spot snorkeling is probably better. The bubbles make all the fish go away!.

A third alternative is this new sport called SNUBA diving, a small raft stays on the surface with the air tanks and you dive down with a hose, a weight belt and a regulator up to 15 meters -a lot of fun and freedom- I did this in Maui with a colleague and I must tell you the experience was great- we saw turtles, all sorts of coral & fish and even heard long distant whale calls. I don't need anything more than that.

But if you want more, if you want the thrill of going deep and be all macho get proper training and stay in shape! I took a 6 month certification course during graduate school, my instructor was called Larry Brow, a great guy from a pretty hardcore military background. We had classes twice a week and he made sure that we were able to do several basic safety routines: being able to swim for 1/2 an hour straight without stopping and without touching the bottom or side of the pool, diving without a mask, diving with ducktape in our mask, swimming with our eyes open, diving in zero or near to zero visibility and checking things like O rings and regulators. Mr. Brown obsessiveness with safety is the only way that I approach diving, a lot of accidents can happen out there. If you are interested in scubba diving do your homework, play safe, understand your limits, get in shape and gradually take on more difficult tasks. Otherwise you are surely bound for an unpleasant experience.

PS: Philip get better man!

Michael B , September 07, 2000; 01:01 P.M.

"Am I going to dive again?"

By the intensity in tone, it is clear that you are suffering quite an unpleasant experience. I would be curious to see how you would rewrite these paragraphs five years from now when the memory of the suffering is not so fresh.

I certainly wish you a full recovery. And I found this very interesting reading. Thanks.

Paul Ashton , September 07, 2000; 02:54 P.M.

While staying on Cayman Brac last December (and all we did was snorkel - I am not a diver) a professional North Sea certified diver stayed at the same B&B for a couple of nights before joining a Liveaboard Dive Boat for a few months' work away from the oil patch.

His experiences working in the North Sea filled me with admiration for his guts and bravery. But there is another side to his story that reflects poorly on operators elsewhere in the world. He told us that he had worked in the Arabian/Persian Gulf for companies who used outdated equipment no longer allowed in the North Sea or Gulf of Mexico. Dive times were often exceeded in the best interests of the client. Through the sub-contractor relationship the oil field owners are not directly responsible for the divers' welfare and there is a lot of pressure on divers to break the rules or lose their jobs. The by-product of such actions is a lot of decompression illness related accidents and casualties.

Phil, your troubles are indeed serious but I think your story potentially gives an opening to wider issues that are often papered over.

My post reflects the opinions of one professional diver, but such opinions are rarely heard where they need to be.

Molly Williams , September 08, 2000; 08:57 P.M.

I too would like to hear why Blue Cross would not cover some or all of this healthcare.

We snorkled off Saba (Dutch Caribbean) a few years ago and found it beautiful. People do SCUBA there, but I couldn't see the need, with so many stunningly exotic fish and fauna so close to the surface. If you're interested in Saba, feel free to e-mail me for info.

Hope you're better soon, but it sounds as though Australia is an ideal place to be ill. Or even sick.

goofus magee , September 11, 2000; 10:29 P.M.

I second your decision to stick with shallow dives. I'll spare my personal SCUBA disaster, other than to say that I still find it hard to believe that so many things could have gone wrong in a five second span.

I was not injured, but things would have been much different if I had been at 60 feet instead of 30.

I haven't been diving in the 20 years since the incident. I'd love to go again if all the following conditions are met:

1. Very shallow dives. 2. Finest equipment in tip top shape. 3. Return to the deck of the dive boat with a lot of air left. 4. Diving buddy must be a highly competent diver who must practice safe diving as a two-person team. The time window for assistance is extremely small. To be of assistance, your dive buddy almost has to operate on the premise that the primary purpose of the dive is to rescue you from drowning. Everything else is secondary. The deeper the dive, the more critical this factor becomes. 5. After my chidren have graduated from college.

I'm a very risk averse person. Motorcycles and private planes are risky, and I have always understood that intuitively. Scuba is a risky pursuit, yet I lacked an intuitive fear of the activity. It garnered my full attention in a very short period.

I made some stupid mistakes and walked away unharmed. Philip did everything according to guidelines, yet he suffered. Give this sport plenty of respect.

Michael Sierchio , September 19, 2000; 02:33 P.M.

85% of people treated for decompression illness were diving within limits imposed by tables or a dive computer (i.e., most people struck by DCI are following the rules)

Philip -

The "rules" come down to us largely from the old Navy Dive Tables, and in any case are statistically derived. There is a smaller margin of safety than I'd like, primarily because the assumptions are: loss of some dive personnel is acceptable in wartime; compression chambers are immediately available.

Anthony Martinez , October 02, 2000; 03:50 P.M.

I would like to suggest that you get checked for a medical condition known as a PFO, Patent Foramen Ovale. Briefly, this is a window between the chambers of your heart that exists while you are in your mothers womb to allow her blood to circulate through your body while your heart is forming. This window is supposed to seal itself within some months after birth. In some infants, it does not begin to heal at all and these infants require heart surgery. In about 10% to 30% (numbers still in dispute) of the population, this window does not seal itself fully but is closed sufficiently to not affect the person adversely. This small unsealed flap between the left and right atria can allow venous blood to shunt into the arterial blood supply before making its trip to the lungs. There are micro-bubbles produced on just about every dive and the capillary bed in the lungs scrubs the blood of these micro-bubbles before that blood is returned to the arterial side of the circulatory system. If venous blood is forced across this window into the arterial side of the heart, it will bring with it these micro-bubbles which are then free to lodge in tissues downstream of the heart. The most dangerous spot for these micro-bubbles to lodge is the brain. Under normal conditions, venous blood will not pass into the arterial supply but in strenous situations, as blood pressure and pulse rate increase, the window may be forced open. This can happen with a strenuous event as shortlived as a sneeze.

I had taken a girlfriend with me cave diving and owing to a new drysuit and a high flow (current) in the cave, it was her most strenuous dive ever. She got bent, subtlely but without doubt. After her treatments and recovery, we got her checked out and she had a PFO. She was young, in excellent condition and had made over a hundred dives but she was a tired and maybe a bit dehydrated. Sound familiar? There are many divers that likely have this condition. A PFO is not normally screened for even in diving medicals. That may change as more people become aware of it. Get checked out if you want to SCUBA

Nathan Tuck , October 04, 2000; 01:42 A.M.

Phil, I have to second the comment on the PFO. Unless you held your breath and embolized or did a very rapid ascent, that is the most likely cause of your trauma.

Your lungs filter out bubbles in venous blood, a PFO will let the bubbles across into the arterial blood. When Nitrogen come out of your tissues, it tends to end up in the venous blood, and this isn't a big deal because the veins get larger the further the bubbles travel in them. Eventually they hit the lungs and they are removed into your exhalation. A PFO allows some amount of blood to get from the venous side of the heart to the arterial without going through the lungs. On the arterial side, the bubbles get stuck in a capillary or small artery. This causes big trouble for the tissue on the other side of that bubble.

Get tested for a PFO. The tests are notorious for false negatives, but if you get a positive it is time to think about hobbies other than diving. Diving can be a very safe sport, but some physiological preconditions make it impossible for certain people to dive without unacceptable risk. It sounds like you may fall into that category.

Jesse -- , October 19, 2000; 12:59 A.M.

FYI-symptomatic PFOs and other ASDs (atrial septal defects) can be repaired surgically or through interventional cardiology. While the repair is fairly safe, you would be at increased risk for long-term complications, not to mention the inherent risks of the repair procedure itself. Unlikely that most people would find diving as sufficient justification for having the repair done unless it's such a significant part of your life. . .

Ryan Taylor , October 23, 2000; 06:18 P.M.

Philip:

Nice commentary on a very serious condition, I thought I'd add a couple of things. In 1993, I was bent. However, I was not within "the limits". I made four dives, with surface intervals of less than 90 minutes each. My deepest dive was 42 meters, my shallowest was 30 meters, all four were decompression dives. This was a very average profile for me over previous years of diving. I had some dive profiles more severe than this. Needless to say this type of diving finally caught up with me and I learned a lot that day.

Although my final dive was not an intended decompression dive it turned out that way. I left the bottom with 3 minutes bottom time to spare. As I ascended, my dive computer kept taking away from my bottom time. Finally, at 20 meters it "caught" me and put me in decompression. It gave me 30 minutes of decompression at 6 meters. Fortunately, my air consumption was good and I had plenty of air. I waited the 30 minutes plus an additional 10 minutes before surfacing.

10 minutes after the final dive I noticed a pain in my left shoulder. Over the next couple of hours it spread to my elbow. I tried to brush it off as a pulled muscle. When I woke up the following morning with the exact same pain I knew what had happened. I immediately called DAN and went to the chamber where I was prompty treated by a diving physiologist. He ran through the same sorts of mental exercises with me and showed me how impared I was mentally as well as physically.

After three days of chamber treatments my mental functioning was restored. My left arm still hurt a lot, and I was much wiser for the experience. I learned that there is probably no such thing as "pain only bends"; the doctor told me that every person he treats for DCS has some sort of neurological imparement. Further, a very large percentage of paitents never fully recover damaged motor responses. I was fortunate that I did fully recover. I sure wasn't taught those things in my certification course!

The final bill when it was all said and done was close to $12,000. I can't say enough good things about DAN. I'm still diving, even some fairly deep dives. However, I do take very long safety stops, long surface intervals, and gave up the decompression diving.

My advice: get plenty of rest before the dives, be well hydrated, stay warm, and dive conservatively. Obviously my severe profiles were the major contributing factor in my case, however, I was cold and not well hydrated that day. All of these factors can contribute to DCS. Individual biochemistry can vary somewhat (as attributed by my bends free diving for years) and not being in good shape physiologically can tilt the tables away from your favor.

Ryan Taylor , October 23, 2000; 08:26 P.M.

Oh yeah, I'd also like to respond to Phil's recommendation to follow a dive table instead of a computer. With over 12 years of experience diving with a computer, and one DCS hit under my belt, I would still take a computer over a table any day. Tables offer a very crude approximation of the dive because they can only calculate one depth. Sure, you plan your dive to 100 feet, but what happens when you accidently slip down to 113 feet along that wall? Bring your table with you? Even if you don't feel the effects of nitrogen narcosis, try lining up the numbers at 113 feet. Now you're not sure how long your bottom time should be. Modern computers are fairly conservative and do a much better job of monitoring your dive profile. However, just remember that the computer is following a mathematical algorithm, not your personal physiology. Knowing this, you can build in your own safety margin with slow ascents, long safety stops and long surface intervals, while still enjoying a closer monitoring of your dive profile.

Jamie Curtis , October 23, 2000; 10:13 P.M.

I'm deeply sorry to hear of your injury. Unfortunately, the dive industry is a lot like the consumer photo industry. There are plenty of Wolf Camera employess peddling dive gear and telling you what you want to hear. They are there to make money. But, much like the photo industry, once you've been around and find out who you need to talk to, you eventually see the dive industry for what it is.

As a trimix certified diver I have been around for a while and dive wrecks that most people will never see. As you lern more about decompression and spend time with people who live deep all the time, you cut through the BS all the standard agencies (PADI, NAUI, SSI) tell you. One of the most importnat things to know is that there is absolutely no such thing as a no-decompression dive. Controlled ascents and 'safety stops' are politically correct lala terms to skirt around what you are actually doing - decompressing.

And evern more distressing, is learning that the guidlines that almost every agency dives by are based on deco tables that in the minds of serious technical and professional divers and current decompression researchers, are COMPLETELY WRONG.

I urge all divers to read through some of the below links. They are written and maintained by people who live in the water, and live deep. What they have to say dive shops don't want you to hear. They are the Bob Krists and Andrew Eccles of the dive world, not the Wolf Camera employee selling you that Vivtar 24-600 zoom to go with your Canon 1v.

Deep stops

GUE

DIR

I urge everyone who goes in the water to get the ridiculously inexpensive dive insurance from DAN. They would have paid 100% of your costs, and would have med-evaced you to a chamber had one not been available locally.

Also, many people grossly underestimate how important hydration is when diving. Whenever I'm on a dive trip I drink constantly. The super secret hydration mix is Cytomax, which is amazing and available at a GNC or other nutrition store.

Ryan Taylor , October 24, 2000; 11:34 A.M.

Jamie brings up a very good point. Every dive is a decompression dive. My comments regarding decompression dives were refering to the fact that I intentionally exceeded the recommended bottom time for a given depth. Jamie also rightly pointed out that the "recommended" bottom times are likely flawed. There is still so much we don't know about gas saturation and subsequent outgassing in tissues. Therefore, it is imperative that every diver carefully evaluates his or her own risks and builds in a safety margin (long safety stops, long SI's, etc.) relative to the recommended dive profiles.

Christopher Biggs , October 25, 2000; 01:40 A.M.

Sorry to hear about your illness, Philip. (And also sorry I missed seeing you speak in Brissy, if you did.)

Having recently spent a bit of time in our (Aussie) public hospital system (I broke my leg in 3 places last November, and now have a stainless steel rod in my tibia), I can concur that these people do a great job, especially given their abysmal funding levels.

One more point about "dive tables" that others have hinted at but not stated outright: dive tables tend to assume you are a super-fit Navy diver who can bench-press any two tourist divers without raising a sweat.

p.s. I note you're somewhat astonished at the concept of drive thru bottle-shops. The ability to buy alcohol from your car is balanced by the ability of the police to stop you at any time and breath test you on the spot. They don't need to show "probable intoxication" or anything. It's called "Random Breath Testing" Drunk driving used to be national pastime---butnot any more; RBT and other measures have had a big impact. (oh ye in the peanut gallery, please don't take me as an advocate of a police state---the freedom-versus-security paradox is a complex issue upon which I hold complex opinions.)

Holger Quast , November 05, 2000; 09:57 A.M.

Hi Philip,

I’m glad to hear you made it through this ordeal and feel all right now.

To help other divers avoid the same fate, you should contact DAN and tell them your experience. One important thing they do besides offering their excellent insurance and safety network is maintaining a vast database of information about dives that went right and those that went wrong. To do this, they mostly collect dive profiles from dive computers. I am sure they would appreciate your well-explained, detailed log as you put on the web, especially if you could provide them with downloads from the computer you borrowed and tell them about the anti-seasickness medication you were on, and about your physical and psychological stress level.

This helps them and the dive industry in the constant evolution of algorithms that describe our physis and that are used to update dive tables and computers. As your physician pointed out, the original type of model has been around for a while, it was developed at the beginning of the 20th century after experiments with sheep had suggested that different tissues of our bodies dissolve gases at different rates. Therefore, these different equilibria were described through “tissue compartments” that have different absorption and outgassing rates. These do not correspond one-to-one to actual body parts like blood, nerves, cartilage, or bones, but use half-life times in steps of 2,5,10, etc minutes to build a model describing the whole system. Once the model was built, the free parameters that describe how the tissue compartments are filled up were then adapted from experiments. This Haldanean model is still used with some additional features in most dive tables and computers, now with updated model parameters from the experience of millions of dives, and the vast majority of experts believes it is a good way to describe gas dissolving equilibria.

A good thing about this model: it allows to design different dive tables for different purposes. Today’s recreational dive tables for instance, since they use no multi-stage decompression and don’t let slowly nitrogen absorbing tissues get saturated, give you more bottom time on repetitive dives than the NAVY tables which were designed for one single deep dive with slow tissue saturation and therefore more involved decompression (and they’re probably designed for fitter people than us). With the same type of algorithm, you can also design multi-stage decompression dive planners such as the Bühlman/Hahn tables or the soon-to-be released PADI TecRec material, or even adapt the model to multiple gas diving if you wish.

A good computer is usually considered even safer than tables nowadays because it can measure your dive profile very accurately, knows your dive history, measures the water temperature, breathing rate (=> stress level), and most of all, makes the whole dive planning a lot easier and hopefully failsafe. Basically, a computer can do everything a dive table can, just a lot more precisely, and incorporates more information about the dive.

Every table and computer however comes with a lot of “soft” rules that are just as important as the “hard” rules, but are sometimes ignored. I call them soft rules because they involve judgement and are not as obvious as looking up numbers in a table as for the hard rules (like computing your no-decompression limits). These soft rules include factors such as the diver’s age, fitness, weight, proper hydration, good sleep the night before, water conditions, etc. If the water is cold or the diver is tired and the nitrogen absorption values like no decompression limits were not adapted accordingly, one simply was not diving in the limits of the table. Since it is virtually impossible to measure the actual gas gradients in our bodies during a dive, the importance of diving conservatively in these soft rules cannot be stressed enough.

Of course diving in table/computer limits and obeying hard and soft rules is no 100% guarantee for bends-free diving, but puts you well on the better side of the statistics. A commercial diving instructor once told me he uses a regular computer whenever he is diving on air or nitrox, but as soon as there were even the slightest stress factors, he’d put it to the most conservative setting. The excellent safety record commercial diving has hints that is a good idea.

Definitely, if one doesn’t feel fit for a dive, no sleep on a liveaboard, no proper hydration, high stress, one is NOT in shape to go diving and needs to stay out of the water. Just like the books say. It’s by no means worth it. Especially after one has experienced even a slight dci hit (and I don't think your symptoms were totally far out), it is imperative to use caution and stay out of the water for a good while, because as soon as dissolved gas and silent bubbles have moved to the next stage of nastier bubbles, a whole chain of physiological reactions results including clogging, antibodies clinging to bubbles causing inflammations etc. This needs time and treatment to wear off. After all, we’re talking about recreational scuba diving, we're doing this for fun. No need for stress. Just like Phil suggests, if you can’t enjoy a liveaboard, stay in a nice resort, let the sun shine on your belly and actually enjoy the diving you do.

Cheers,

Robert Bryett , November 13, 2000; 08:07 A.M.

First of all, I'm really sorry to hear that Philip Greenspun suffered from decompression sickness. Secondly I very pleased that he appears to have made a good recovery. It can get much worse. I first became interested in decompression sickness on my first substantial diving expedition in 1978, when I met a dive-shop owner who was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a spinal bend. I didn't fancy that much, so although I'm not medically qualified, I read everything I could find about the subject, attended courses and conferences and subsequently taught the subject as an instructor.

According to the article above 85% of people treated for decompression sickness were diving "within the limits". In my experience the vast majority of recreational divers (well over 90%) don't know enough, or keep adequate enough records, to know whether they are following the rules or not.

I've tested sizeable groups of divers of intermediate and advanced (mostly BSAC 2nd and 1st Class, but some PADI and NAUI) qualifications on the use of US Navy, Royal Navy and RNPL/BSAC decompression tables with truly scary results considering that these people were frequently acting as instructors, dive marshalls etc. More complex tables, dive profiles or attempts to calculate the effects of repeat dives increased the error rate considerably. Many of these examinees had been trained by other instructors, so their failures at least could not be ascribed to my undoubted limitations as a teacher.

One would hope that dive computers would avoid the problems caused by inability to use the tables properly, but I'm not so sure. It always worries me when people let little boxes do their thinking for them, and I'm not convinced that the box can take account of all the factors that affect decompression. I also worry that they encourage a "dive first, think about decompression afterwards" attitude, when it ought to be the other way round, and make divers too relaxed about multiple repeat dives.

As regards symptoms, I've found that few instructors emphasise that central nervous system involvement in decompression sickness is common, and that ANY symptom normally associated with other CNS damage such as head injuries, strokes, spinal injury and so on CAN be a sign of a bend.

I have met other divers who thought as Mr. Greenspun did, that the fact that they tended to use up their air quickly lowered their risk of suffering a bend by shortening their dives. I've not seen any real statistics on that, but it should be pointed out that the factors that increase air consumption (cold, hard work, apprehension, poor fitness etc.) all also increase the risk of decompression sickness.

Finally I've done a lot of live-aboard diving, but it was in chartered trawlers which travelled slowly to the rumble of a single, slow-turning diesel, and we normally anchored at night. Haste and trying to pack too much into a day, or an expedition, is the enemy of safety in diving. A couple of years ago, a Barrier Reef dive boat zoomed away from a dive site, leaving two divers behind in the water whose absence was not noticed for some time. Both perished.

Ernest Anthae , November 25, 2000; 08:39 P.M.

Cold Water and Exertion a Contributing Factor -

Although nobody has mentioned it, the vascular system itself expands and contracts considerably during a dive, particularly in cold-water high-exertion dives. People start out with their core shutting down their extremities (mild hypothermia getting suited), then the cold water shock sends their vascular system into severe constriction to protect their core heat. If they then do a high-exertion deco dive, such as in strong-currents, their vascular system opens up more and more, until they may actually be sweating in their suits. If you've puffed and panted underwater, then you know what I'm talking about. After, getting out of the water and changing, people's vascular system contracts again, and may trap those N2 micro-bubbles still escaping from their tissues. Breathing O2 might have absolutely no benefit at that point.

Avoiding deep-exertion or long-duration or cold-water dives, (and wearing just enough rubber to stay warm but not sweating) might be a good way to avoid DCS. Worth checking DAN's stat's: "What percentage of DCS occurs in cold-water diving regions?"

A LOT of people report mild bending after high-exertion dives.

Denis Roy , November 27, 2000; 07:54 P.M.

Being a novice diver myself, Phil's bad experience just shows me how much worth a good diving education is. During a one-term diving class (about 80 hours of training in total), we had to pass a lot of circuits and swim tests before we were even allowed to go on simple beach dives. It wasn't a very pleasing experience sometimes but I think I was taught a safety lesson. I frequently can't believe that other divers get the same certificate after taking a one-week course.

Tom Breuel , November 29, 2000; 05:03 A.M.

Sorry to hear about your problems, and I'm glad that you are feeling better.

I started recreational diving a few years ago and got interested in DCS when I felt unusually achy and tired after some dives, as well as when seeing an instructor with serious type II DCS.

People already have pointed out a bunch of important issues (get insurance, etc.). Here are some additional suggestions.

First, I would always take a refresher class after not diving for a year or two (in our club, that's a requirement, not an option). Equipment and techniques change. And different instructors emphasize different points, and they differ in quality.

Also, I am a firm believer in planning with tables and still carrying a dive computer. While I try to dive within tables, the computer has a good chance of catching it if I accidentally go too deep or get confused about the time. I use the computer as an additional safety device, not as an authority.

Perhaps most important, though, is to realize that DCI isn't binary. Just about any dive will produce nitrogen bubbles (and they apparently can cause cumulative damage in many divers that have never experienced DCI). How big those bubbles are, what effects they have on various tissues, and whether the effects bother you really is a very individual thing. Both tables and dive computers are based on population statistics. In order to use them effectively, you have to calibrate them to your own risk preferences, dive conditions, and physiology. Dive computers are actually rated and compared for whether they are "conservative" or "aggressive", and many of them have different settings you can choose among.

I can't blame you for deciding not to dive after having experienced DCI. I would probably make the same decision after a serious incident of neurological DCI. Still, my impression is that among the many things that go wrong when traveling or engaging in sports, DCI actually is fairly treatable, usually resolves pretty well, and is only very rarely fatal (arterial air embolisms and drowning seem to be the more likely fatalities).

Is SCUBA worth it? You have to decide that for yourself. SCUBA clearly has risks, but in the accident statistics I looked at before starting SCUBA diving, non-overhead recreational SCUBA diving didn't come out as particularly risky among various common recreational activities.

simon jessurun , March 25, 2001; 12:34 P.M.

Even the Padi tables are not safe for diving periods longer then 24 hours.This information is printed somewhere on the dive planner in fine print and not well known.The consequence is that they are not safe for use on a diving holiday where you dive each day.I grimly discovered this as four passengers on one of my flights got the bends. They had been on a three week diving holiday where they did a one week open water course, a week of free diving and finally an advanced course.They had a three day period before flight well within the limits of dive tables.I have been shown that in these situations good dive computers give more reliable results. Thanks for a nice article. simon jessurun

Lanier Benkard , May 28, 2001; 03:05 P.M.

I'm sorry to hear that Phillip got "bent" and I wish him well. I did want to add one comment regarding the "standing eyes closed" test, and that is that in my opinion it is a completely unreliable test for anyone that has been living on a boat. When you live on a boat, your brain adjusts so that it thinks that a rocking motion (which it senses from the fluid in your ears) is normal. Reflecting this, sailors (who have not done any diving at all) often come home with what is called "sea legs", in which they have a slightly impaired sense of balance. If your eyes are closed, and you can't rely on the fluid in your ears, how do you expect to perform a test which is difficult for people in the best of circumstances?

Charles Mackay , July 05, 2001; 07:29 P.M.

DCS is the single biggest safety risk in scuba. The following is based on my experience diving for four years in Venezuela and the Antilles, during which I logged 300+ dives at depths up to 180'.

Often I would get back on the boat and notice people didn't feel well, were taking aspirin, lying in their bunk, and were evasive about their dive schedule. I'm glad we never had to helicopter any of them to a chamber in Maracaibo or Willemstad.

Philip's story is scary becuase he followed the "rules" as given in most dive books, magazines, etc.

Since in this case the diver used meters and stayed within the algorithms, it seems at first glance that his experience makes him a statistical "outlier". However, there are several things about the pattern of dives that suggest a higher possibilty of DCS:

Multiple repeat dives to moderate depth, increasing the level of slow tissue staturation. Dives are not very deep, but there are a lot of them over several days, so the diver never really desaturates (even though his meter may say that he has). Shortly before the symptoms got really bad, there was unusually heavy exertion, further increasing the level of tissue nitrogen saturation. Because the pattern of dives was moderate over several days (as opposed to, say, a couple of 50+ meter dives that would be likely to cause immediate and dramatic DCS symptoms if mismanaged) this diver's DCS symptoms were mild, but became aggravated as the pattern of frequent, medium depth dives continued. Because the symptoms were not severe, they were ignored, or attributed to other illness or genreal fatigue / malaise, etc. and corrective action was delayed.

The dives did not require decompression based on the meters / tables used. However, decompression (ideally multiple stops at 15m/10m/5m to allow slower degassing, as recommended in, for example, the British Sub-Aqua Club -- "BSAC" -- Diving Manual) on any dive is believed by many to substantially reduce risk of DCS. Hang at 3m-5m on any and all "non-decompression" dives for 10 minutes -- it's cheap insurance!

The U.S. Navy tables, which many people still rely on, call for stops at 10' only in many cases, and are quite risky compared to those formulas used in, for example, BSAC tables or modern dive computers. They suggest, for example, that a (short!)dive to 180' (±55M) can be conducted safely w/o decompression.

Live-aboards encourage us yuppies to dive very hard schedules, which we are often not in shape for. Repetitive dives create unique opportunities for DCS, especially getting up to 3+ dives a day. Making the dives shallower may simply increase the possibilities for slow tissue saturation. Likewise, the belief that shallower dives do not require in-water decompression is, in my view, delusional.

My rules were: keep well inside the (BSAC) table or meter limit, always decompress (just swim around the shallow reef in 5m of water for 10 minutes, or hang on a decompression line. Put a weight on the decompression line so it hangs straight, and look at your meter to keep the depth.) Do not do more than two repetitive dives. If you must do three, keep the last under 33'-- you won't be degassing, but you won't be taking on more N2.

(DO NOT LET THE PILOT DROP AN ANCHOR INTO THE WATER ABOVE YOU AS AN OPERATOR DID TO ME WHILE I WAS HANGING ON A DECO LINE, HAPPILY HE MISSED, BARELY.)

Take aspirin daily, and pay attention to how you feel. Read everything DAN publishes. Use your meter correctly and understand what it is telling you.

Be safe, and happy diving!

James Stapley , July 08, 2001; 10:21 A.M.

Charles - you say take an aspirin daily - why? What would this do to reduce risks of DCS?

Charles Mackay , June 13, 2002; 12:47 P.M.

Aspirin acts as a blood thinner, so you get better gas exchange.

Andreas Brendl , August 30, 2002; 09:43 A.M.

Dear Phil,

I am sorry that this happened to you. I am diving isnce 4 years (50 dives) and training for my divemaster. I learned diving in Cairns diving with Mike Bell. In two points you are 100% right any kind of stress and physical unfitness gives you the danger of DCI. In my opinion a beginner (until 30 dives) should not dives more than 2 dives per day. Wreck diving and current is not very easy, what in the end results in stress. Inone point I am not with you. I would never dive with tables, if I am doing a multilevel dive. Use a very conservative computer. A modern computer can be set into different diving modes.

The most important rule to provide DCI is: With 100bar air you are on 10 metres with 70 bar you come to 5 meters with 5o bar security stop and finish. Always think to this rule and the chance getting DCI is very very low.

I wish you nice dives and great underwater pictures.

Greetings

Andreas

John Miller , June 06, 2003; 12:22 P.M.

I hate to say this but I think you did not suffer from DCI. Let's be honest, you dived everytime in the limits of your tables and dive computers, you were not dehydrated and you are not overweighted so there is no physical reason why you should get DCI. I have the impression from your report that the hospital in Australia with that nice modern decompression chamber was pretty quick in diagnosing a DCI. Such an expensive chamber must be used by a lot of patients in order to justify and refinance the costs of this investment. Therefore a doctor in this hospital is probably pretty prone of making a diagnose of DCI in anybody who is rather wealthy and was diving during the last fourtyeight hours. As you said, the symptoms of DCI are very contradictory and hard to diagnose. Why should then a simple balance test at the end be sufficient to make this diagnose? I don't understand this. I think you had headaches from using lots of scopolamine, noise on the boat, sun, little sleep, or maybe from a bad stomach (infection?), and maybe not from DCI. Therefore it might be possible that you were hooked by that hospital with the hyperbaric chamber to serve as an other paying "patient" (...easily by credit card!). Maybe I am wrong, I hope. There is no harm towards you and your decision of doing this treatment intended. If the treatment was wrong then there is no harm being done to your body. It then was just a waste of time and lots of money.

Cheers Rick

Tom Wilson , September 25, 2003; 05:18 P.M.

This statement struck me as odd:

"I never considered myself at any risk of the bends because I tend to consume air rapidly."

Since you know that DCI is caused by excess nitrogen in the body, where do you think that nitrogen comes from? That's right, it comes from the air you breathe. Breathe faster, and your body will accumulate nitrogen more rapidly, not less. Keep this in mind: slow steady breaths.

But as many have pointed out, the tables and computer algorithms are derived from past painful experience. Like that old joke about how they determine weight limits on bridges. You drive bigger and bigger trucks over the bridge until it collapses. Then you write down the weight and rebuild the bridge. There's no reliable way to predict DCI.

Mike -- , October 16, 2003; 03:28 P.M.

"At all times the computer showed that I had ample time remaining at my current depth for a no decompression stop ascent."

I hope this doesn't mean that you skipped any of the safety stops. You should always perform the "3 for 5" (3 meters for 5 minutes) safety stop. It's there to help pad your margin of safety.

Will Riddle , May 19, 2004; 03:08 P.M.

Sorry to hear about what you went through.

I would like to point out a few things. If you are a PADI certified diver then you should be familiar with the fact that it is recomended that on all dives you make a 3 minute safety stop at 15 feet, plan the dive ahead of time and not just go based on what your computer says you can, after each dive you should use your wheel or table to see where you are at and to plan your next dive (no matter what your computer says), and you should always dive withen your limits (limits of training, physical fitness and mentality).

Although it is after the fact, when the divemaster changed the dive plan you should have decided to either not dive or request that he go with your planned dive or he not go at all. I am a professional diver and when I get to a sight I always check out the swell and current and how everything looks before I make a decision to dive, even when on dive boats and liveaboards. If a boat is acting as you discribed then you should be concerned with your safety and with bottom conditions even if they say it is calm on the bottom, because you still have to get back on the boat. Allthough we don't like to because we have spent the money already and our peirs are with us it is ok to say no to diving based on conditions and how you feel.

I would hope that you will still dive and that when you do you stay within your limits and stay safe.

Philip Greenspun , August 28, 2004; 11:44 A.M.

Hmm... I'm kind of surprised at these comments mentioning the need for safety stops. It is as though the people writing them didn't read the article. Which part of "We did a 2-minute stop at 10 meters and a 3-minute stop at 5 meters and then ascended." was ambiguous? In any case, just to be clear... before getting bent, on this dive that was no-decompression by the tables, I did a safety stop at 10 meters and a safety stop at 5 meters.

Andy de la Cour , November 25, 2006; 02:28 P.M.

Enjoyed reading your story, though I am a little disturbed by some of the theories presented by so called medical experts. Cutting a long story short, I would say that you either did not have a bend, (some of your symptoms are totaly unheard of in my experience)or you sufer the effects of a PFO.( as previously decribed by one or two of the people commenting)The physician at the treatment centre was almost duty bound to claim that you had a bend, both for financial reasons and legal / litigation reasons. An independant assesment from a qualified diving doctor would have been better. As the vice chairman of the Jersey Hyperbaric Treatment centre, ( Jersey UK not US) we often treat people as a precautionary measure, as we are unsure about the symptoms or occurence of a bend. I should also point out that we are a charity organisation and all of our staff including physicians offer their services absoloutley free. We would have treated you once on a table 62, (18 meteres for 4 hours on oxygen and air) as a primary treatment. Based on your symptoms, I doubt very much that they required several days treatment. In any event you are well, that's the main thing and I am very glad for you. Another pointer towards the determining the PFO issue is " Do you sufer with Migraine"? many people with PFO suffer with migraine. Putting a PFO right is a fairly new medical procedure and before you jump at the chance of having it corrected (if you need to) consider that the risk of failure of the op out weighs the risk or consequences of a simple type 1 bend. regards Andy de la Cour

Patricia Klopper , May 08, 2007; 05:43 P.M.

Most of all, I'm actually curious how you are doing now, and hope you've been diving after your DCS.

In reaction to several people and (in my opinion) rather strong beliefs: unfortunately diving medicin and the treatment of DCS is still no exact science. Who can possibly tell whether Philip Greenspun has or hasn't suffered DCS while not having had the change for a proper physical evaluation? And then, still...

Maybe I can illustrate by telling my story in brief. I was an assistent SSi instructor, with some over 300 dives, as well as my buddy, who is also my boyfriend, as well as a surgeon and has a degree in basic diving medicin. I suffered DCS last year after a dive. If I hadn't seen blueish-dark red spots all over my body, I also would have thought I was suffering a really bad case of migraine. (Because I do -very occasionally- have migraine). Also a diving instructor with over 30 years of experience told me I needed to take a cup of tea and a paracetamol because I couldn't possibly have decompression sickness. And I so wanted to believe that, so it wasn't untill some 8 hours later I finally went to the hospital.

To be very brief, I was misdiagnosed at Curacao as a "mild case". I had 4 treatments to which I actually almost had to force the nurse to, who told me some story of having my period and the risk of embolisms in hyperbaric treatment... (?). Immediately after the treatment we had contact with DAN, where I have my insurance and they told me it actuallly really sounded as "severe type II DCS" and they'd preferred me to have more treatments. I wish I had listened then. But I didn't, I wanted to go home (which they allowed me to after 24 hours post-treatment) and go back to normal life. Also, as some might know, doctors and in this case their partners are the worst patients ;-)

Now, 7 months later I sometimes at bad days still have a lot of concentration problems, and some of my fingers have probably suffered permament nerve damage. Returning to the normal life was more difficult than I had anticipated it to be, because my normal life is also a very busy life being a designer running my own business.

In a few weeks, I will have a test to determine a possible PFO or not, but as for now, they are reluctant to allow me to dive anymore, due to the permanent nerve damage.

You don't want it to, and it doesn't have to be likely, but things can really go very wrong even if thing seem otherwise. After the DCS experience I had, I'm always very interested to read stories like this one, and almost every time I'm very suprised by all the people who think they seem to have all the knowledge...

I wish I had taken it a bit more seriously back then, when still something could have been done.

Brandon Foster , August 20, 2007; 05:20 A.M.

Firstly, Mr. Greenspun, I am sorry to hear of your injury.

I am shocked at the relative confusion about why a doctor would give a balance test to a suspected DCS case patient. If you would kindly take the time to read about the symptoms of Type II DCS, which I believe is what you had/have Mr. Greenspun, you will see that inner ear troubles are listed, somewhat comically as "the staggers". Further beyond this, Headaches are not listed in the DCS symptom profiles that I have found until you start dealing with Type II. For what it is worth, it WAS worth the $2500, and that is a small price to pay considering the alternatives. You did the right thing Mr. Greenspun, and if you decide to never strap on a tank again, I can't argue with the logic. You have had what amounts to an EXTREMELY close call, and from the literature that I have ingested, you got really, REALLY lucky. Glad to hear that you are O.K. though.

Brandon

Abe Mieres , September 30, 2007; 03:20 A.M.

Sorry about your incident with Bends and thank you for posting such an informative article.

From reading your article I can see what was the key misconception that triggered this event. You mentioned that you didn't consider yourself at risk because you consume air rapidly. The assumption being that it would reduce your exposure to nitrogen by shortening your diving time at those depths. The error is that TIME is not the factor that determines the amount of nitrogen absorbed by the body. It is the amount of AIR that passes through your lungs together with your heart rate.

You see, Nitrogen and oxigen use the same mechanism to enter your bloodstream through your lungs, which means that if you consume air rapidly you also absorb nitrogen rapidly.

The times in the decompression charts come from empirical experiments done with young US Navy divers in top physical condition and under ideal conditions. This explains why 85% of divers who suffered from Bends were within the limits of the tables: those limits are for divers that are young, fit & experienced. Everyone else, especially the occasional diver, that consumes air more rapidly should adjust the times accordingly (reduce them proportionally).

For example your divemaster consumed about half the amount of air you did during the same dive. That would be equivalent to you spending twice as much time as he did down there. This also shows the problem of beginners and unfit people diving together with fit and experienced divers: the beginner is going to absorb much more nitrogen and should not follow the same timelines as the experienced diver.

Seems to me like those charts need to be adjusted and changed from time-spent to air-consumed, that way that common and dangerous misconception may be avoided.


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