Freaking out about hypothetical DCS

[Noemi]

I wrote about this in some other thread but it was lost among other comments and I really need an advice.

Here is my problem: I enjoy diving and not worried about our murky waters at all, but every time after a dive, even a pool one, I am freaking out about getting DCS, look for the symptoms and every little thing feels like a sign of the trouble. I stay well within my limits, have a conservative computer, very careful not to drink alcohol and not to overdo on sports two days before and after dives.

I am not hypochondriac about my health normally, being pretty healthy overall, yet after each dive it's the same story. I even called DAN and asked them to calm me down when I felt weird after a pool session.

I am usualy a pretty down to earth person, don't worry too much about hypothetical things, but all these warnings and stories about DCS, especially an unexpected one truly get to me.

So, the questions. Does it improve with experience and more dives? Do you / did you ever have the same worries about DCS? If yes, how do you solve it?

 

[boulderjohn]

I have long argued that we make students too concerned about the dangers of DCS. DCS is a very, very, very, very rare event. You cannot get it in a pool session. Period. They could feed you tanks down there for three days before you surfaced, and you would be fine. If you were to get it, it would show up pretty quickly after the dive--not days later. Alcohol is not a known contributor, except for ability to dehydrate you. Although dehydration is considered to be a contributing factor, there is no research indicating it is an important contributing factor--despite what some people will tell you.

I have done a lot of dives over a lot of years. I know a lot of people who have done a lot of dives over a lot of years. I do not know one personally who ever got DCS on anything other than a technical dive well beyond the limits of the dives you are doing.

For the dives you are doing, take a deep breath and relax. The odds are much greater that you will have a car accident getting to or from the dive site than you will get DCS on the dive.

 

[CuzzA]

Perhaps this perspective will help a little...

Come over to Florida and watch the many Gulf Coast spearfisherman doing 3, 4, 5 repetitive (hard working) drops in OW depths, 60 ft., with maybe an hour surface interval and no safety stops.

By no means am I advocating this or do I dive like that myself, but when I was a new diver I was taken back a little bit. I thought to myself, "ok, getting bent is bad, but it's not as likely as I thought."

Dive enough and you won't even think about it.

 

[TMHeimer]

Yes, all what they said. My very first post-OW cert. dive I was using tables -- had no computer. Calculated that I was down ,like, 54' on a square profile, when in fact most of the dive was at 20' and the venture down to 54 lasted all of 5 minutes. I thought I had a rash on my arm and really started to worry. Funny looking back on that. Dive conservatively, pay attention to your computer and don't get overly worried.

 

[CT-Rich]

This sounds like something that is not really dive related. Having an anxiety attack about DCS after a pool session is something else. You might want to speak to a family doctor. My worry is that if you stopped diving, you would start having anxiety attacks about other things, like work, driving, turning the stove off or something else.

 

[tbone1004]

what they said above. This is an anxiety thing and you need to learn to slay that dragon. It's not something that is likely to come with experience because it is in your head. You're going far above and beyond with precautions to prevent it than people I know that do fairly intense decompression dives. Sure we will behave ourselves and not hump gear around immediately after we get out, but nothing like multiple days before and after. I hydrate quite a bit starting 2 days before, but that's because I get splitting headaches when I get out if I don't from being dehydrated, not dcs.

One thing that may help slay that dragon for you is getting a computer where you can program gradient factors into your diving. That way you are controlling the theoretical tissue loading when you surface. You don't want to go over 70% of theoretical saturation, then set the gf-high to 70, if 85 is OK for you, then set it to 85. You get to choose. Giving you direct control over that and a computer that shows you what your tissues are theoretically doing may help. Keep in mind, we are measuring with a micrometer, marking with chalk, and cutting with an axe, but the incidents of actual DCS are VERY very small, so much so these days that many chambers are being shut down due to lack of "business" from divers. The sport is getting very safe, but check this video out below which shows how the Shearwater actually tracks your tissue loading and can show you during the dive where the tissues are loaded. All true Buhlmann ZHL-16C computers track this way, but this is the only one I know of that can actually show you during the dive

 

[KevinNM]

Dehydration was correlated to high altitude aircrews getting the bends at altitude in WW2 iirc, but I don't think an actual mechanism has been found.

But anyhow, if you read accounts of people getting bent it usually isn't at all subtle. And it is not very delayed after they get out of the water.

 

[Noemi]

This sounds like something that is not really dive related. Having an anxiety attack about DCS after a pool session is something else. You might want to speak to a family doctor. My worry is that if you stopped diving, you would start having anxiety attacks about other things, like work, driving, turning the stove off or something else.

When I started diving, I was reading a lot of materials to see how possible it is and when I worried too much after the dive I called DAN to ask them to calm me down. Cause, you know, you can read that it is possible to get a DCS from a pool session, it's just it's unlikely, but some people did get it.

Don't really have anxiety about anything else. It's just... the whole training was "be careful, or DCS"! A lot of messages on the forums. Any book about diving I looked at talks about DCS in detail. I know now that it is unlikely, but I didn't get that impression from PADI materials or other sources. Mostly "if you don't do this and this, you are guaranteed to get DCS, and even if you do everything right, it is still possible to get an undeserved hit so be careful". Never thought I will be worried about something like that.

Doesn't stop me from diving though

 

[2airishuman]

When I started diving, I was reading a lot of materials to see how possible it is and when I worried too much after the dive I called DAN to ask them to calm me down. Cause, you know, you can read that it is possible to get a DCS from a pool session, it's just it's unlikely, but some people did get it.

No. No one has ever had DCS from a normal pool session (12' deep pool or thereabouts).

The few isolated reports of DCS-like symptoms at very shallow depths are believed to have been misdiagnosed. As you're learning, there are all kinds of things that can cause some of the symptoms of DCS, among them overexertion and inner ear barotrauma. Hyperbaric treatment makes some of these go away, due to the passage of time, rest, and the fact that a PPO2 > 21% causes quite a number of minor symptoms go away even if they weren't caused by DCS.

Don't really have anxiety about anything else. It's just... the whole training was "be careful, or DCS"! A lot of messages on the forums. Any book about diving I looked at talks about DCS in detail. I know now that it is unlikely, but I didn't get that impression from PADI materials or other sources. Mostly "if you don't do this and this, you are guaranteed to get DCS, and even if you do everything right, it is still possible to get an undeserved hit so be careful". Never thought I will be worried about something like that.

I won't try to address any possible psych angle.

My advice, as a diver, is to get in the water and dive, in benign conditions, gradually increasing your exposure to depth from one diving day to the next. It's a prudent way to be sure that your reaction to N2 loading is not far outside the norm. It's what I did, and I've now dived deliberately to NDLs for training purposes so that I know there's nothing about me that makes me uniquely susceptible to DCS. Is there still a chance I could get some DCS symptoms even if I dive my computer? Well, sure, but those symptoms are likely to be minor rather than life-threatening or life-changing.

And in reality, there are all kinds of worthwhile shallow dives. You can do a lot of diving before you run out of things to see above 60'.

 

[halocline]

I would recommend that you learn as much as you can about basic decompression theory. A good start is in the PADI encyclopedia of recreational diving. Generally speaking, the more you know about something, the less vulnerable you are to developing a phobia about it.

One thing that you'll learn is that extended stops at 10 ft are extremely efficient at off gassing in NDL situations. Another thing you'll learn is that single NDL dives are typically controlled by the faster 'compartments' which goes towards explaining the efficacy of the extended shallow stops. You can also learn about various dive behaviors that are thought to be associated with DCS and avoid them.

You already know about non-diving factors like dehydration and fitness.

One you are armed with knowledge that you are doing everything you can both during the dive and out of the water, it's simply a matter of desensitizing yourself to the fear of DCS through repeated dives.

Good luck, I hope you can learn to enjoy diving without worrying about DCS.