Bad experience....have you got over it?

[markDoerr]

I thought all i needed was a minute or two to catch my breath, but i didnt seem to be able to. My heart was pounding a mile a minute and i consciously tried to slow and deepen my breathing.... but I just couldnt get enough air and I was begining to panic!

I remember looking around me and being absolutely convinced that there was no way in this world that I would ever see the surface again, and i was surprisingly quite calm about it.

I remember thinking that i just needed to get a really deep breath and then i would be fine...and if i took my mask and reg off i could get that breath that i so desperately needed....

At the same time as these thoughts were running through my head I was also just remembering to breathe in... breathe out...breathe in.... breathe out..and trying really hard to logically think out what i needed to do from here.

It was soo very hard to work through the fog of panic to what i had to do.

My buddy was right next to me so I signalled him that i wasnt ok and i was going to the surface. I slowly headed for the surface and was amazed when i got there, I really really didnt think i would. My buddy reached over and inflated my bc and asked if i was ok, then my instructor surfaced next to us to see what was going on. I said i was fine and needed to go back to the boat, so my instructor watched as i swam back to the boat.

My worst involved the same issue. I was a new AOW and it was dive 14 or 15. We were going to 97 ffw to a wreck in Lake MI. We were boat diving and There was a 3 - 4 ft chop. I didn't like the chop, but I felt I could handle it. So we did a back roll at the stern and pulled ourselves up a granny line to the bouy. It was a little work getting there had to fight the waves to avoid banging the boat and all. . . Checked in with my buddy, who is a very experienced, and started our decent.

My buddy decended very rapidly. I had a little trouble equalizing, but took no more than 30 sec to fix, yet my buddy was so far ahead of me that I could signal him. So I started speeding up to catch up to him. We got to the bottom and he got ahead of me again.

I was winded at this point and could not catch my breath. What I felt reminded me of what asthmatics say about breathing through a straw. I tried resting, but my heart was racing and I was begining to feel panicy. I recognized the panic feeling right away and called the dive. By the time we got up to 75 ft I could feel my breathing returning to normal. At 60 Ft I was feeling pretty good, but I had ripped through so much air at 95 ft that there really was no sense in turning around.

My assessment? Working too hard, wrong reg for those depths, and . . . What do you think . . . Narked?

 

[lamont]

good to hear people acknowleding ****ups. I was reading some of the DIR posts (in a different thread) and get one of them to admit any racing heart beat at 60m will be like trying to get a hotel room with water in New Orleans.

Around dive #20 I was doing a boat dive and my air got turned off and then on 1/4 turn. It was enough so that the second stage was breathable all day at 1 ata, but basically quit on me at 3 ata. I didn't know enough at that time to figure out it was my valve, so at 60 fsw I had to go OOA on my dive buddy / instructor / DM for the dive. Mostly that gave me the confidence though to know that OOA procedures actually worked in real life and didn't freak me out about future diving.

I had a rapid ascent from 70 fsw sometime around dive #60-ish which probably caused me more trauma. I put on an extra layer of thermals without adjusting my weighting and was at least 5# too light, plus was having issues venting through my drysuit and managing the huge bulk of the insulation I was wearing. Managed to get to around 30 feet holding onto rocks, but from there, tried to swim to an overhang at around 15 feet and missed it and went ballistic. That one caused me post-dive trauma, because at that point I thought I was better than that. It definitely taught me the importance of managing your weighting properly.

Oh, if we're coming clean about general screwups as well, I also jumped off a boat without my fins on about 2 months ago or so. I blame the heat stroke I was getting while suited up in my drysuit. That was just extremely embarassing though.

 

[Steele]

25' | Viz 10' | 750 psi | 60F
Fin tangled in dive flag line. Buddy didn't notice.
Heard the GET THE HELL OUT voice. Buddy returned after 30 seconds and laughed at me through his reg as he casually flipped the line off my fin with a flick of his fingers.

100' | Viz 15' | 2000 psi | 53F
Heard someone calling me - 'Heeeeeey, yoooooou.' Okay, I'm narked. Hear the GET THE HELL OUT voice again. Over-breathed reg and signalled to ascend 20'-30'. Ascended 25' and continued dive.

~mike

 

[Web Monkey]

I can't speak for the other aspects of the event, but this is yet another reason to buy a first class regulator. The last thing you want is a reg that breathes hard when you're under load at deep depths.

A good reg will deliver enough air for 2 divers to be hoovering at 130' and beyond with no noticible difficulty breathing.

Terry

I was winded at this point and could not catch my breath. What I felt reminded me of what asthmatics say about breathing through a straw. I tried resting, but my heart was racing and I was begining to feel panicy. I recognized the panic feeling right away and called the dive. By the time we got up to 75 ft I could feel my breathing returning to normal. At 60 Ft I was feeling pretty good, but I had ripped through so much air at 95 ft that there really was no sense in turning around.

My assessment? Working too hard, wrong reg for those depths, and . . . What do you think . . . Narked?

 

[boogeywoogey]

AS I Mentioned...it rapidly detiorates into a "ME"fest.....your stories are crap compared to mine....

boogey

 

[TheRedHead]

Here's my worst. Diving Punta Sur in Cozumel to see a group of black tip reef sharks which were at a certain spot on the reef. The drop was rather critical to get us in position to drift past the sharks. 6 of us backroll off the boat and start to descend and I'm having trouble clearing my ears. Everyone had kicked down really fast and half the group were already out of sight. I finally kick down to find my buddy and another diver so we take off after the group. We're at 115 ft and swimming parallel to a stiff curent.

My head doesn't feel right, my ear is not quite equalized, I just feel as if this dive was going wrong and I need to either get myself straight or call the dive. We get to reef where the sharks are located and observe them for a while. All the time, I trying to clear my ears and tell myself I have everything under control.

Now, we're working our way up a sand chute and my left ear refuses to clear. Back down I go and try again and again for what seemed like forever. My buddy and the DM are looking very worried at this point. I'm working my jaw around and make a rather forceful attempt at a Valsalva and hear this god-awful, high-pitched, EEEEEEEEEECCCCCCH and the entire world starts spinning out of control. I start breathing hard, trying not to vomit, and concentrating on slowing down my breathing. I start feeling light headed and I know I'm making everything worse by my rapid, shallow breathing. I shut my eyes and focus on my breathing. I also started drifting up and I probably drifted up 30 feet or so before my buddy brought me back down. After what seemed like an eternity, everything stopped spinning and we were able to make a normal ascent with our stops. As soon as we surfaced, I finally vomitted, had blood in my mask which made the DM very concerned. He called Memo who came bicycling out to our SI location and Memo got me an appointment with the doctor.

I was checked out by the local diving doc and he told me how lucky I was not to have blown my eardum out, got presecriptions, orders not to dive, but all I could think about was how lucky I was not to have died.

Two days later, I was itching to dive again and I have since dived Punta Sur without any problems.

 

[TSandM]

My first potentially panic-inducing experience was my 3rd dive of the OW dives. We went to descend "with visual reference to a line", in about 10' viz, and I lost sight of line and lost control of my descent, and ended up completely disoriented and plagued with vertigo (because of no visual reference to the surface OR the bottom) until I smacked into the bottom flat on my back, and all alone. The funny thing is that, except for the bewilderment of the disorientation, I wasn't frightened. And when I found myself on the bottom, I sat up and thought about the whole thing, and remembered the lost buddy procedures I'd been taught, and went on to do a very careful, slow ascent, watching my computer the whole time. I surfaced about 100' from where we had started the descent, and my instructor had nearly had a heart attack in the meantime. But I was never really scared. I had air, I had a protocol I could implement -- nothing was really WRONG.

On the other hand, I had an uncontrolled ascent at about dive 40, from somewhere around 50 feet, due to getting my can light cord wrapped around my inflator and being unable to vent my BC. My brain went blank, and it never occurred to me that I had a rear dump -- nor was I able to control my posture to get horizontal to USE said rear dump. Things just went from bad to worse. The only good thing is that I didn't hold my breath, and we hadn't been down long enough, I guess, to have a significant DCS risk. But it was truly frightening. Unfortunately, my response to that was to try to stay negative all the time -- I got really afraid of neutral buoyancy, because one never knew where THAT was going. Took quite a few dives to get through that one.

 

[SwimJim]

Divorce was final 11 April 1992. Scaryist thing in my whole life.

Jim

 

[Fish_Whisperer]

The story about getting rolled in the waves is hilarious because it happened to me on a shore dive in Cozumel. The waves were just rolling me over and over, and my tank and fins and all of my gear was just flopping around, along with my arms and legs, and all I could do was laugh and laugh, thinking, "Ohhhhhhh nooooooooo's!! Very baaaaaaaad!!!" LMAO

I got left behind when I surfaced and the dive boat had boogied for the shore because one of the dive leaders had to take a crap. I inflated my BC and just bobbed around for about 20 minutes, preparing to either swim for an anchored buoy, or else swim for shore. Nothing really scares me, but that was pretty damn annoying.

 

[Snowbear]

Got a couple new ones, though only one is diving related....

My FD rescue crew was caught in a smoke explosion (there's a bit of contention whether it was a backdraft or flashover) while searching an upstairs room for someone who supposedly had not exited the building when it caught on fire. We were a few seconds from getting baked beyond recognition if we had been unable to bail out

All the occupants had, in fact, evacuated. We survived the experience and yes, I'm "over" it.

As for diving, I had a bad experience in Palau a couple weeks ago. Got to depth (94') on the first dive of the day and lost my breakfast. The fish loved it . After the 3rd time I puked and my primary regulator was giving me more water than breathable gas, I aborted my dive. I lost count after about 8 episodes. I found out that it's actually difficult to maintain buoyancy for stops while dry heaving so hard my chest and back muscles hurt the next day. I also got about the worst headache of my life.

Anyhow, I shot a bag so I could at least maintain depth while I was distracted. I surfaced and signalled the boat. He asked if I was OK and I said no. I asked for O2 and breathed that and tried to drink water until the rest of the divers came back. I say tried..... couldn't keep it down :sick: I don't know what happened other than maybe something at breakfast was not supposed to be in my stomach.

I ended up feeling better, but had to sit out the next dive while I rehydrated. No more problems the rest of the trip, and the other divers assured me that my "hard-core" designation was still intact

Guess I got over that one as well