"Drifting Dan" Carlock wins $1.68 million after being left at sea

[doctormike]

Yikes... I'm toast (as a long time lifeguard earlier in life).

So a single intense exposure can cause skin cancer. How long would it take from the time of exposure to manifest itself?

That's one way of looking at it... the other way of looking at it would be that being a lifeguard ratcheted up your melanin production over time and actually protected you from cell damage!

 

[lemon]

I hesitate to prolong this little side thread, and I think that my other post about the different nature of legal proximate cause and medical cause and effect pretty much addresses the issue that you raise.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion, and I don't mean to deny you that by posting facts that contradict that opinion. I am supposed to provide background medical information on this board, so that is what I did here.

It is extremely difficult to link any sort of cancer case to any sort of environmental exposure. In medicine, the host response has so much to do with who gets what condition, that you almost never "prove" causality with any certainty. Sure, we can say that this patient's fatal hemorrhage was caused by his aortic rupture which was caused by his gunshot wound to the chest. But patients with malignant mesothelioma who weren't asbestos workers had a lot of trouble proving proximate cause and getting restitution, for reasons like the one that you raise. Even though huge amounts of population data show that tobacco "causes" lung cancer and oral cavity cancer, you can never prove it for any single patient.

If it makes you feel any better, I would also not be willing to testify that he wouldn't have gotten cancer if he hadn't been out at sea for four hours on a foggy day, so we are in agreement. But to imply that a single severe sunburn doesn't significantly raise your baseline risk of melanoma - whatever that is - is just not supported by well documented and published scientific evidence. Hence my comment...

Hi Doctormike,

You are misunderstanding my point. Of course any degree of sun exposure will raise your risk of various types of skin cancer. As you posted, some cancers are associated with a pattern of tanning and some cancers are associated with a pattern of severe blistering sunburn. However, to claim one sunburn as the specific cause of your cancer is laughable (this was my original point). I never said it wouldn't raise your risk of cancer (albeit, it would likely do so in a very small way). Using a single sunburn as the basis of a legal claim after living a lifetime under the sun just fails the whiff test. I don't think that contradicts what you copy-pasted regarding skin cancer.

Lemon

 

[lemon]

Actually, two of the three citations do refer to a single episode:


"a history of severe sunburn at any time in life"

"The sun exposure pattern believed to result in melanoma is that of brief, intense exposure — a blistering sunburn"

I will give you that the second quote could be read to be referring to more than one sunburns. And while my other response to you should better address the question of cause and effect, I think that you may be missing the point.

EVERY malignancy starts with a single mutation in a single cell at a single time resulting in a line of cells that divides without the normal controls on growth. So just because you don't get lung cancer from the first cigarette you smoke, that has more to do with the statistics of cell injury than anything else.

So the bottom line is that of I could never in a court of law testify that without a doubt this sunburn resulted in that melanoma - no one could. That is an impossible bar to pass. But the law doesn't require that sort of proof. It just requires demonstration of probable proximate cause. And for that discussion, you will need to hear from the legal moderator..

It is important to review the literature with a critical eye. That first quote comes from a case-control study (i won't get into that) that lists a history of severe sunburn among other factors as a risk factor for melanoma.

As you are well aware, cancer is a multi-factorial disease process.

I stand by my comment that claiming a specific sunburn exposure as the cause of your cancer is, to be frank, ridiculous. Of course, I am speaking from a medical perspective and while nothing in these references contradicts that point you are quite right in suggesting that this is ultimately a legal question - and Truth isn't necessarily always relevant in matters of law.

Anyways, I think this is enough about sunburns - litigious or otherwise.

 

[Zippsy]

As...

4) If, in fact, as Ken maintains, he had surfaced with a safety sausage, 1,100 feet away that would have meant that he submerged at about 9:00. At that range, about goalpost to goalpost on a football field, I would expect a competent lookout with binoculars to have identified a distressed diver waving a safety sausage.
It seems that the case has had a significant effect on the way that boats do operate. So he's got his cake and can eat it too.

I'd get tired quickly playing football on your field.

 

[ItsBruce]

Ken, thanks for clearing up the bit about Dan not actually being a part of a buddy team. That, of course, would answer my earlier question about why Dan's buddy didn't at least notice he was not aboard or hadn't entered the water on the second dive. I'm going to have to think more deeply about the legal significance of the relationship between what Dan did that people think was wrong and what ultimately happened.

Does anyone know who the expert for Dan was or what he said?

Ken ... if you have the depo transcript for Dan's expert, I'll read and summarize it for everyone.

 

[jar546]

It's bizarre about the dive buddy thing (that no one could agree who it was). And he kept diving for 15 mins AFTER he lost his buddy? I think there's a bit of personal responsibility going on here, but it's not clear that the jury realised it.

This is why the award was reduced by the jury. The bigger issue is marking someone back on board when they are not then marking them back in the water on the 2nd dive location when he was not picked up from the 1st.

 

[iztok]

By his testimony, it was after he had been on the surface for some unspecified amount of time.

- Ken

That makes no sense! If one for what ever reason results to ascent w/o visual reference it would only be prudent to deploy SMB as soon as possible. Esp. after not seeing the rig (intended target of the dive). From perspective of a diver you want to make yourself visible as soon as possible in such situation.

 

[fnfalman]

DIVE EXPERIENCE/PREVIOUS DRIFITING
Dan was AOW, had about 70 dives, had been in currents before, and also had two entires in his logbook that indicate he surfaced well behind other boats on two previous occassions. In both of those instances, he simply waited for the boat to come get him.

For some reasons I thought the guy only had like 15-dives under his belt.

I feel even less sympathetic for the guy now. He ain't no cherry and should have known better.

Doesn't absolve the DM/shop of anything but if I were on that jury, I definitely would have knocked the dollar amount down. Way down.

 

[SCUBASailor]

It doesn't matter how many dives the guy had under his belt. It doesn't matter that he made huge mistakes before, during and after the dive. The boat left him behind because they did not know that he was not aboard. How can you possibly (even partially) blame the diver for that?

 

[idocsteve]

It doesn't matter how many dives the guy had under his belt. It doesn't matter that he made huge mistakes before, during and after the dive. The boat left him behind because they did not know that he was not aboard. How can you possibly (even partially) blame the diver for that?

That's pretty much what the jury said too.

My biggest issue is the huge dollar award because the guy had to sit in the ocean for 5 hours.

Heck I'd sit out there all day for a cool $500k.