Hello Dinohunter, unusual for a NSL dive, but more common if you ascended too fast in your dive profile and exerted yourself quite a bit in most of these dives.
These are not typical symptoms of bends so its possible for a divemaster or captain to discount it. Had it been accompanied by a fit of coughing and chest tightness its more like chokes. Nevertheless, a sudden onset of shortness of breath is always a harbinger of problems. Abdominal pain with chokes symptoms could be due to a massive offgassing from the abdominal region and bubbles flooding the pulmonary artery. Had symptoms resolved quickly on 02 it suggests some form of DCI, such as chokes. If it were your heart or lung issues it would not resolve too well with 02 [such as a ruptured lung]. If it were due to some muscle, back or tendon sprain or stomach issue, it would not ease at all with 02 ... alas, no 02 'trial' makes it hard to differentiate what it could be.
How these symptoms localized is puzzling, but an MRI of spine would be needed after your recompression. Typically, the massive offgassing eventually causes bubbles to filter through the lungs, or via a PFO, and these causes an AGE. Your symptoms are more akin to spinal cord bends localize to a low thoracic segment but an AGE is more likely. An MRI of the brain and spine would be helpful.
Those sensations are likely paresthesias, they occur when nerves are recovering from an injury ... its like sitting on a bar stool and having your legs go to sleep, during the recovery the 'electricity' sometimes is painful ... these are nerves sending wrong signals for what it senses. How long it lasts is difficult to say, it depends on how injured they were. An MRI can guestimate the extent of injury.
Assuming you executed a no-risk profile NSL dive, this is an unexpected hit of some severity beginning with a large abdominal offgassing, is this patient overweight by any chance? While a transit through the lungs in semi-large offgassing is common reason for bubbles to transit the lungs, a return to diving at some point may warrant checking for a PFO ... albeit unlikely as patient would have been hit hard early around the first hour that symptoms began.
Chokes is often written to have the potential for a fatal outcome. But that depends really on the volume of bubbles that enters circulation. Just last month, I treated a chokes diver after a trimix dive with 45min of 02% with complete resolution of all symptoms. Key to DCI is early treatment, and the ease by which He mobilize is advantageous over dives with N2 as the primary gas in bubbles.
His symptoms began as a vague abdominal discomfort, that increased in intensity that he attributed to his weight belt. He then began coughing, which progressed to fits of drying, loud, hacking coughs ... uncontrollable. This was 30min on surfacing. By near 1 hour post dive, it had lessened, but continued and he also felt 'off' and weak, a tad short of breath. By one hour, he was getting lightheaded, developed scotomas and orthostasis with reflex tachycardia. The speed by which 02 relieved these s/s was remarkable, 1-2minutes. Tachycardia, fatigue, and 'off'ness resolved rapidly but would return once the 02 was removed. The symptoms and signs were over after continous 02 for 45min. Why 45min? It was all the 02 we had, but s/s were stable by 20min, the extra 25min was icing on the cake ... insurance against a call to 911, which I had planned but luckily did not have to do.
