Bent in Belize--Blue Hole Incident

[Dive Bug Bit Me]

You can dive again. Just follow the rules. Its not difficult.

1. Buy a backup computer.
2. Never do trust me dives.
3. If your equipment fails you are done.
4. Always dive with a buddy.
5. Do not trust Dive ops at blue hole!

You need to follow the rules from now on. :goingdown:

I am all for learning from the mistakes of others. It hurts a lot less. But we need to be sure that we learn the correct lessons.

Yes you can dive again. I know two people who have bent themselves (both expected hits), been on a chamber ride and are diving again. Both did consult a diving doctor a few months after their respective chamber rides to confirm they could dive again. Both are a lot more conservative in their planning now days.

Buy a backup computer: The jury is out on this one. If your computer fails your current dive is over. Exit with a best guess safety stop. You are done for 24 hours. If you have a back up computer then you can continue the dive instead. Its a personal risk / reward decision. What is the risk of a computer failure versus the risk of sitting out for 24 hours. For recreational diving, I tend towards accepting that infrequently I might miss one or two dives.

Never do trust me dives: Nuff said.

If your equipment fails you are done: Agreed.

Always dive with a buddy.: Not really. If you have the right mind set, equipment and skill a solo dive carries minimal additional risk. The problem comes in when solo without the right mind set, equipment or skill. Then you are looking for trouble. For the OP, your planning challenges lead me to think that solo is not right for you at the moment. You either plan a buddy dive or plan a solo dive. A bunch of random divers in the water at the same time is neither and looking for trouble.

Do not trust Dive ops at blue hole: Why only at the blue hole? Trust dive ops, but ask yourself before any dive plan is this really a sensible thing for me to do based on my past diving experiences and training. I would suggest that a single cylinder dive to 160 ft is not a good idea. Why so deep? I think we maxed out at about 144 ft on my blue hole dive.

You need to follow the rules from now on. Most important learning point.

 

[Roland Luijken]

Thanks for sharing your story.

When I started to dive almost all dives where deco dives.
It is so easy to do just stay deep a bit longer. Diving is easy.

But there will always come a day when you will get in trouble.

I was lucky I did my training later on and started to understand what could have gone wrong.
Now I can assist people doing there deco trainings.

Thousands of untrained divers are doing the thing you did at this very moment.

It was not only your fault but also the diving community and commercial aspect is a factor.

 

[SeaFlea]

themagni....... I had to chime in. there has been alot of negative discussion on your future as a scuba diver. I think some of these folks would have you publicly flogged for dangerous behavior even though it has exactly NOTHING to do with them or their scuba lives. I think your choices that day were poor. I know you know that as well. I think you acted, that night and the next day, with a above average response. You have good judgement and I think did everything within your power to try to get treatment. To continue to dive in the future is your decision. I think if approved by a doctor you should continue to dive, a sport I enjoy very much. I think you will learn from this event and become a better, smarter diver. I hope you get well and suffer no lasting effects from this day of diving.

Good (safe) Dives,

SeaFlea

 

[Mike]

Yeah, I know, and the point was that it's easy to say "no! dickweeeed!" when you're on the computer at home. (Or, say, in a hyberbaric oxygen therapy session.) "I'll drive to the shoreline tomorrow, no big deal." I've called local dives just because three bad things happened.

It's really hard to thumb the dive when you've been looking forward to it for years and figure you're the least likely candidate for getting sick. "No problem, ten years from now I'll fly back down to Belize and try it again."

My last vacation before this was my honeymoon in 1998. When's my next one?

Again, I'm NOT trying to make excuses or condone what I did. I'm just admitting what I did wrong and telling the unvarnished truth about how things went sideways. It looks like a fair number of people have taken what I learned the hard way and are learning it the easy way.

What you just wrote is exactly the reasons why I agree that you should probably not dive anymore. You can't fix what's broken because you are missing what should make you understand that you should thumb a dive you've been looking forward to for years, you should think, no problem in 10 years I'll fly back down to belize and try it again...

Sorry, but you seem like the guy who dies on Mount Everest or kills others trying to save you because you wouldn't turn around before the summit because you rationalize 10 reasons why you should keep going instead of turning back 100 ft below the summit. The guy who lacks the maturity and respect required that keeps your focus on what's important which is not bagging the trophy.

There is always another time to dive, diving is not more important than your life or your health. It's hard for me to believe if you have 100 dives that these last 3 were totally exceptional to your first 97. Anybody with the lack of judgement that you made on your last 3 dives has most likely lacked judgement on some of your other dives, you've just not posted about those, and you've been lucky up til now, each one of those just made the next slip down the slippery slope easier. I suspect you have more dive stories that could be told.

None of this makes you a bad person, just a really bad diver. I'm not on a crusade to get your C card revoked, only commenting to give you some reality that might save your life. In the end you'll do what you want anyways, but my advice would be to stop diving until you reach a lifesaving epiphany about how out of control your diving has become, some reflection looking back at just when did you take the divergent path, self-analyze through you log book until you come to a realization of at some point you started diving without a fear of self-preservation.

 

[TechDeep]

Yeah, I know, and the point was that it's easy to say "no! dickweeeed!" when you're on the computer at home. (Or, say, in a hyberbaric oxygen therapy session.) "I'll drive to the shoreline tomorrow, no big deal." I've called local dives just because three bad things happened.

It's really hard to thumb the dive when you've been looking forward to it for years and figure you're the least likely candidate for getting sick. "No problem, ten years from now I'll fly back down to Belize and try it again."

My last vacation before this was my honeymoon in 1998. When's my next one?

Again, I'm NOT trying to make excuses or condone what I did. I'm just admitting what I did wrong and telling the unvarnished truth about how things went sideways. It looks like a fair number of people have taken what I learned the hard way and are learning it the easy way.

If you're retaining that attitude, I'm not sure you really learned anything, even after all you've been through. Just because I may only actually go to one super bowl party in 10 years doesn't mean I'm allowed to drive home drunk. Not a completely direct analogy, but planning ahead, maybe making some arrangements "while sitting at home in front of a computer" might be prudent. I don't know, maybe something like renting another computer as close to the one you already own as possible as a backup might not be a bad idea for that next trip that will cost you several hundred, maybe even thounds of dollars.

Maybe putting a fraction of the effort into planning ahead as you do getting the cheapest flight and hotel might be something to think about.

 

[aprxh]

What you just wrote is exactly the reasons why I agree that you should probably not dive anymore. You can't fix what's broken because you are missing what should make you understand that you should thumb a dive you've been looking forward to for years, you should think, no problem in 10 years I'll fly back down to belize and try it again...

Sorry, but you seem like the guy who dies on Mount Everest or kills others trying to save you because you wouldn't turn around before the summit because you rationalize 10 reasons why you should keep going instead of turning back 100 ft below the summit. The guy who lacks the maturity and respect required that keeps your focus on what's important which is not bagging the trophy.

There is always another time to dive, diving is not more important than your life or your health. It's hard for me to believe if you have 100 dives that these last 3 were totally exceptional to your first 97. Anybody with the lack of judgement that you made on your last 3 dives has most likely lacked judgement on some of your other dives, you've just not posted about those, and you've been lucky up til now, each one of those just made the next slip down the slippery slope easier. I suspect you have more dive stories that could be told.

None of this makes you a bad person, just a really bad diver. I'm not on a crusade to get your C card revoked, only commenting to give you some reality that might save your life. In the end you'll do what you want anyways, but my advice would be to stop diving until you reach a lifesaving epiphany about how out of control your diving has become, some reflection looking back at just when did you take the divergent path, self-analyze through you log book until you come to a realization of at some point you started diving without a fear of self-preservation.

I do not believe the op should have done the dive and then started using another computer, but using your logic anyone that did dive the Blue Hole and is not tech trained should not dive anymore either. That would be a lot of people.

I think by the op posting this may make people think twice before exceeding their training for a dive like this.

 

[ScubaSteve]

I do not believe the op should have done the dive and then started using another computer, but using your logic anyone that did dive the Blue Hole and is not tech trained should not dive anymore either. That would be a lot of people.

I think by the op posting this may make people think twice before exceeding their training for a dive like this.

I am on the OP's side BUT, they did far more wrong than just exceeding their training level. If it was just breaking the recreational limits then I would sick the Scuba Police on them and move on. There were many other errors in judgement made. And if the OP is not able to understand where all they went wrong (a big one is their refusal to call a dive simply because they were on vacation), then they are destined to repeat history only the next time they may not be so lucky.

If they can accept where they went wrong and not fall into the same traps again, then they could have a long and safe diving career ahead of them.

 

[Duke Dive Medicine]

I still don't fully follow the situation here. Thousands of divers do the same profiles in the blue hole every year without problems, many of them coming off of liveaboards where they will have even greater buildup because of the constant daily diving. So why the problems for the OP, why him ??? What did he do different than all the other divers? Was it the alcohol? Was it dehydration? Was it the obvious lack of proper nutrition? Was it a pre-existing medical condition?

Sorry but I'm just not buying that his problem stemmed from a broken computer or lack of reading charts when he is following the same basic profiles and conditions thousands of others are having no problem with. There has to be more to this. And I would suggest he not get back into the water until a doctor has examined every cubic inch of him and determined beyond reasonable doubt why this happened.

Putting aside for a moment the admitted and well-discussed shortcomings in the OP's decision-making for this dive series, he essentially followed along with the dive group. Your question then is, "Why weren't the rest of them bent?". We've been struggling to answer that for a long time. A couple of things we do know:

1. No dive table or decompression algorithm is 100% safe.
2. Even within recreational limits, the tables and algorithms are not iso-risk. In other words, the deeper the dive and the longer the bottom time, the higher the probability of DCS.

It's not unusual for one member of a group that follows the same dive profile to get DCS while the others don't. We see it all the time. And I suspect that if you actually counted the countless thousands and analyzed all the cases of decompression sickness among dive groups who perform the same dives as the OP did, you'd come up with a significantly higher rate of DCS than the baseline for Carribbean PDE divers.

Best regards,
DDM


Best regards,
DDM

 

[vladimir]

If you're retaining that attitude, I'm not sure you really learned anything, even after all you've been through.

I think the OP was trying to give us some insight into the mindset that led him to make such poor decisions, and I think it is constructive. I doubt the repetitive scolding is, but who knows, maybe he missed all the others. I would guess that most people who get bent do so not out of ignorance of prudent practice, but rather some variation of the OP's thought process.

 

[tyesai]

I find these threads fascinating mainly because it makes me wonder why we do such things. It brings me interesting thoughts of free will and what prior conditions were met to make what seems like an informed, well spoken individual do everything that they know they shouldn't. Cool thread, glad you're o.k. and thanks for the sharing your tale...