Question Ever experienced Nitrogen Narcosis?

[rongoodman]

I was diving EAN32, which probably helped some.

Why do you think that would make any difference?

 

[Belzelbub]

Why do you think that would make any difference?

Less partial pressure of nitrogen compared to air. EAD would have been around 90’. So some help. Each diver brought their own gas, EAN was not required.

 

[tursiops]

Only the divers that ignore the first signs of narcosis,light headed, mild euphoria or giddiness, poor peripheral vision ( video footage you can't remember taking) a reluctance to leave the bottom on time. Loss of touch ( solid objects feel soft) and double vision or poor communication with a buddy or the surface. I've experience them all but I've always been able to give an accurate account of my dive to my stand-by. There's always a warning, but you can ignore it or choose to deal with it.

People have different reactions to gas narcosis. What YOU experience may not be what others experience.

 

[rhwestfall]

People have different reactions to gas narcosid. What YOU experience may not be what others experience.

at least with my autocorrect blunders I get the spelling right...

 

[Barefoot_Lawyer]

Less partial pressure of nitrogen compared to air. EAD would have been around 90’. So some help. Each diver brought their own gas, EAN was not required.

Aren’t you supposed to use END, not EAD?

 

[Belzelbub]

Aren’t you supposed to use END, not EAD?

I think we are talking the same thing. When I took EAN, it was EAD. But, it does refer to the partial pressure of nitrogen at the depths in question.

 

[Akimbo]

The effect is horrifying, I wish there was more footage exploring the subjects during and after at various depth and time. It's like they're temporarily touched by madness. Alcohol doesn't impair quite like this.

This is pretty misleading, but your conclusion is understandable. Notice that the inside tender (guy at the far end) is not acting like a drunk. People, especially in groups, get pretty giggly on their first chamber runs — even to 60'/2.8m. The voice change and a fun new experience, combined with a little trepidation, is the cause. Of course the people in the video were also narked, but so was the tender. The difference is experience and narcosis management.

I had the opportunity to make chamber dives, dry and in a wet pot, to 285'/87m in US Navy First Class Diving School. This was in the 1970s when the PPO2 limit was 2.0 ATA instead of 1.4/1.6.

We were all seasoned Second Class divers but there was plenty of joking and laughing past about 165'/50M, which exceeded our previous chamber runs. The purpose, among other things, was to learn narcosis management. Here is an image of the chambers. The vertical section on the end extends into the lower deck and is half filled with water. They were really old then, build in the late 1920s.

None of us could reliably do abstract thinking, like math, but everyone managed to assemble pipe puzzles and tie familiar knots underwater with 3-finger mitts on deep sea suits at that depth — obviously with a lot of concentration.

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The course was based on decades of experience where divers learned to manage narcosis the hard way, by trial and error. The most notable event was the salvage of the submarine F-4 that sank off Pearl Harbor Hawaii with all hands in 1915. That was a very complex job where they had to invent untried solutions as they went. On top of that, she was in 306'/93m of water. No divers were lost in spite of the record depth and primitive salvage vessel.

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SAFETY WARNING

This should NOT be interpreted as a signal that recreational Scuba divers can do the same thing!

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Primitive as the dive gear was, the Mark V deep sea rig, it had the advantage of being tethered with unlimited air and telephone communications. The divers were also the most experienced the Navy had.

That said, recreational Scuba divers can learn to manage narcosis by slowly and cautiously progressing deeper. The depth limit in Europe was 50/165' for decades. The problem came after training courses were dumbed-down and shortened. New diver's got their C-card and went straight to 50m, with limited skills and no narcosis experience.

I was on an unintended 165' air saturation dive, the result of a Decompression Treatment Table 4 where the patient went bad. I was the inside tender but the Norwegian doctor had never been under pressure before or had any hyperbaric training. He managed to function but was very slow doing procedures he had done thousands of times before. He performed the same procedures like he was on the surface after an hour at holding depth.

The patient finally came to and passed a neuro exam, after over 6 hours. The poor doc got pretty upset when learned that he couldn't leave the chamber and go home without a couple of days of decompression. This was before computer decompression algorithms so our only option was to use saturation decompression tables.

My hope is sharing these experiences will provide a little more perspective on nitrogen narcosis.

 

[billgraham]

Nitrogen Psychosis! Whenever I felt narced, it was never pleasant, more like anxious and confused. Cold and poor visibility seemed to make it worse. It can come on in an instant. My worst episode was diving the Manuela wreck in Cape Hatteras (180 fsw) with air and O-2. It was sunny, great viz and I had about 35 minutes on the bottom. I went back to where we were tied in and thought I'd go swim across to look in a hole in the hull about 60-70 feet away. I had another five minutes so why not? I came out of the hole and the sun had disappeared, and everything felt and looked different, and I was lost. Five minutes of looking for the line, and I had to tie off a reel and ascend, I had left my o-2 bottle with the lift bag near the anchor line. Long story short, I breathed every drop of gas out of my LP 95's until my Poseidons started freeflowing, and surfaced after about 120 minutes. Needless to say, everyone was up on the rails of the boat, scanning the horizon for my dumb ass!

 

[JonG1]

Diving with Stevie Wonder

» Diving with Stevie Wonder | reflections from my underwater world

www.johnchatterton.com

 

[agilis]

While living in Jamaica back in the 70s I experienced nitrogen narcosis frequently. It would hit me mildly around 110 feet, but it was not in any way disabling. I was fully aware of the sensation and sometimes would amuse myself by moving up to about 105 feet where the symptoms completely disappeared instantly, like flicking a switch. No aftereffects, nothing lingering at all. Drop down a few feet and I'd start to feel pleasantly high again. At 130+ fsw It became sufficiently acute to require my full concentration to do simple things. All my diving back then was with ordinary air, obtained from a resort a few miles away from where I was living. The deepest I ever dove was an occasional quick bounce dive to 150 feet where the steep slope (covered by thousands of Blackcap Basslets in their tiny tunnels) ended at a ledge and a sharp drop-off into what looked like infinity. Little Bloody Bay.