How I got bent... Sort of.

[ppo2_diver]

I was telling this story to a dive buddy recently and realized that I didn't post this when it happened. Sorry for being so out of date.

The date was November 19, 2005. I wasn't feeling well that evening and I decided to go to bed early. About 10:30 PM I woke up with a severe pain in my belly. At first I thought it was the spicy chili I cooked for dinner that evening. I rushed to the bathroom, vomited and nearly passed out. I felt better and decided to go back to bed thinking it was something I ate. But laying in bed, I couldn't get comfortable. The pain in my gut was still there and spreading. I could only lay on my left side. I finally dozed off for 90 minutes before I was woken by a severe fire in my belly. I rushed to the bathroom again and vomited. This time I briefly lost consciousness. Concerned about the life insurance check, my wife "rushed" me to the hospital. By the time I reached the emergency room, I couldn't stand up straight from the pain in my stomach and was very lethargic.

To make a long story short. I had to undergo an emergency appendectomy within 2 hours of reaching the hospital. About 4 hours after undergoing my operation, I started to get a severe grinding pain in my shoulders and collar bone area. I mentioned this to my surgeon (he is a diver, BTW) who told me something very interesting. The procedure used to remove my appendix is called laparoscopic surgery. During this type of surgery, air is injected into the stomach cavity to lift the muscle and fat tissues off the organs so the surgeons can get the instruments in and work. Air still remained in my stomach cavity after they sewed me up and it progressively moved up into my shoulders and neck. Just undergoing my very first surgical (and near death) experience, I started freaking out that I'd have to go for a chamber ride after I had just been gutted. The doctor assured me that it wasn't DCS as the air bubbles are not coming out of the tissues and growing (as the case with DCS) and will just sit there until absorbed by the body and exhaled through the lungs. The air just followed the path of least resistance and settled in my shoulders and neck. He said no chamber ride and the pain would be gone in another 4-5 hours and would not cause any nerve or muscle damage. He gave me Vicodin which put me in orbit for 4 hours. When I came back to Earth, the pain was gone.

So I now can joke with my diving buddies and students that I once got bent without ever diving.

Dive Safe,
Duane

 

[TSandM]

In fact, it's unlikely the gas migrated into your shoulders and neck. What was more likely was that you got irritation of your diaphragm from the gas in the abdomen. The body doesn't know what to do with information from its innards -- it's never learned how to localized those signals -- so it interprets them as coming from the body surface area that's embryologically associated with the viscus in question. In the case of the diaphragm, pain is felt in the shoulders and neck.

I learned this the hard way, by ignoring shoulder pain as a complaint from a patient who otherwise looked like he had a simple case of the stomach flu. Turned out he'd perforated his large intestine, and the big clue was the pain in his shoulders as a result of inflammation of the diaphragm. The body is a weird thing sometimes!

 

[WesTexDiver]

Wow thats pretty scary one. Glad you came out ok.