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I'm not trying to be an a-hole or Captain Obvious here, but it's like the guy who complains to the doctor "It hurts when I do this...". The not-so-obvious answer is to stop doing that which hurts you. If you don't know why, don't dive until you do, or at least back way the hell off and be cautious. There's absolutely nothing down there worth risking disability over

Hi Pete,

"...stop doing that which hurts you." I had a few doctors tell me that regarding joint issues. 30 years later, it turns out their advice was right on. I manage my joint issues by doing exercises that make my joints feel good and I avoid activities that make them painful. I am surviving without surgeries and prosthetic joints. Different issue, same strategy.

There is nothing down there worth playing Russian roulette over.

as always bro, cheers,
m
 
Hi Jill,
Had a bad DCS2 hit back in September of 2014.
Wrote it up in TDS.
The Deco Stop
You can use anything from it.
Since then have been diving rebreathers without any further DCS and using GF55/85 for the first 3.5 days of diving 2 deco dives a day. Taking the afternoon dive off on the 4th day and then restarting the schedule on the 5th day. When I say deco I mean 20+ minutes of 1.6 O2 starting at 9M.
My balance is still slightly screwed up from the 2014 DCS. I can't stand on one leg with my eyes closed, I wander slightly while walking in place with my eyes closed and I occasionally scrape a foot while walking, although that has slowly improved over the last 4 years.

Michael
 
I'm working on an article for DIVER Magazine about DCI hits. If you are willing to answer a few questions, please email your response to:
JillHeinerth@mac.com

Thanks!

Please let me know if you wish to be anonymous or if you would not mind sharing your name with a quote:

IF YOU HAVE BEEN BENT ANSWER THIS:

Have you been bent?

How many times do you think you have been bent?

How many times did you seek treatment?

Did you use DAN insurance?

Do you consider your incident to be minor or major?

Do you think there was a root cause for your DCI hit? If yes, what do you think was the underlying cause?

Do you think your hit was a sport’s injury?

After your hit, did you return to the same level of diving as prior to the incident?

After getting bent, were you able to look back on your diving career and see other times when you might have been close to bent or bent and did not seek treatment?

How many times do you think you might have been bent?

Did you feel social pressures to hide your incident?

Did you experience any negative feedback from the internet or other sources after getting bent?

Please share any personal anecdotes that might be important to our readers.


IF YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN BENT:

Do you think DCI is a sport’s injury?

Do you think that people who have been bent did something to deserve their hit?

Why do you think that people get DCI?

Would you dive with someone who has been bent several times?
Why or why not?

Do you think that your diving practices will protect you from getting bent?


If you are willing to share your name, please indicate how you would like it to be referenced.

I think you might want to consider the case of “might have been bent”. In cases where divers have what might be symptoms and choose either to attend a chamber or not, and the reactions of peers. “You can’t be bent.” Vs “Go just in case, they are the experts.”

A lot of responses on this thread seem to indicate that people believe a that there is a deterministic relationship between the profile and other factors (hydration etc). I don’t believe that, I think those just change the position on a probability distribution and the hit is random. The chances can be influenced and you can criticise a diver for not minimising the chances whether or not they have a hit, but a hit is always possible even if the chances are minimised. Enough people go diving that quite low probability events will occur. It is inevitable that ‘undeserved’ hits will happen.
 
Does anyone know if there are fewer unexplained hits on RBs in comparison with OC given the optimisation of ppo2 across the dive.
 
Nobody here seems to know, or didn't mention the last ideas about pfo written in a German magazine 'Wetnotes' october 2018: There is normally NO reason to get a pfo closed, even there is no reason to quit diving or even quit technical diving with a pfo. They talk about surface oxygen. And that seems to work really really well.
A nice read for people who directly shout: close it. No, in most times not needed and no reason to quit technical diving.
They also write that after a first hit no need to check for a pfo.
And another point: after trimixdives, there can be less bubles than after a NDL dive.

I see dcs as a sportsinjury, nothing more. Like breaking a leg with soccer. It can always happen.
The only thing is that if it happens to you that people will think you did something wrong. This is why people don't talk about it.

Another big big problem with dcs in my eyes is that there is also no concensus between doctors. Some say stay out of the water for 2 days after treatment and others will say 6 months for the same dcs. A lot is unknown. So you can never ever blame a diver who decides to follow his own way as there is not 1 way that is best. And people blame others then. This makes the whole issue unable to talk about. Most people will not talk about it.
Some people are more prone to get bent than others, without reason.
 
Nobody here seems to know, or didn't mention the last ideas about pfo written in a German magazine 'Wetnotes' october 2018: There is normally NO reason to get a pfo closed, even there is no reason to quit diving or even quit technical diving with a pfo.

Read the Wetnotes article and shook my head. Think that would be the way to go for the vast majority of divers who never enter decompression and will never start coughing underwater. Spoke to a few friends at the Tec Event at lake Thun on 16 March about it and they were also of the opinion that as long as you are doing "itty bitty weenie dives" it shouldn't make a bit of difference, but as soon as you start doing more than a few minutes of staged decompression with decompression gasses, not having a PFO might save your life in addition to reducing your risk of having a stroke by about 80%. Doing serious Decompression Dives with a PFO is like Russion Roulette when you keep pulling the trigger.

Michael
 
Read the Wetnotes article and shook my head. Think that would be the way to go for the vast majority of divers who never enter decompression and will never start coughing underwater. Spoke to a few friends at the Tec Event at lake Thun on 16 March about it and they were also of the opinion that as long as you are doing "itty bitty weenie dives" it shouldn't make a bit of difference, but as soon as you start doing more than a few minutes of staged decompression with decompression gasses, not having a PFO might save your life in addition to reducing your risk of having a stroke by about 80%. Doing serious Decompression Dives with a PFO is like Russion Roulette when you keep pulling the trigger.

Michael
I absolutely don't agree. I have seen people bent without pfo, and the general concensus is still that even if you have a pfo, it does not say thaty getting bent is due to a pfo. If I would have been bent, I would try surface oxygen for sure. A closure is still a risk.
And another thing: I know from at least one person who got bent, did not have a pfo according to a test. A few years later got bent again and now had a pfo. So a test is not always saying you don't have it. It can open and it can close. The people who wrote that article are the ones that are more or less experts in diving science nowadays.

Testing is still not recommended if you don't have problems and even not after a first hit.
 
Michael, care to elaborate on scientific sources for this drastic view? If it is of help, there are I think some of the real experts in the medical diving community following this website. One can find their postings in the board. I understand the consensus view is to not advise testing for a PFO when starting tec diving, and to even not automatically advise a test after a DCS hit. Having a PFO may increase the DCS risk, but from my reading of scientific literature, any connection is much less clear than most divers think or wish. Testing for a PFO and closing it has risks, and it is absolutely not clear that for everyone these are smaller than some additional DCS risk.

Russian roulette has a risk of 1 in 6, right? Even if one blankly buys the famous factor of 4 greater DCS risk with a PFO, it is still less than 1 in 1000. And a chamber ride will not fix a bullethole in the head. This comparison is misguided.
 
But with a PFO bubbles can bypass the lungs and end up on the arterial side so even if they are micro and would have been sub clinical the risk is increased of damage.
 
And another thing: after a 100m dive you can have less bubbles than after some days doing 'simple dives within NDL'.

The chance to get bent with a pfo is much less than 1:1000, more 1: 5000-10000 as the chance to get bent overall (including the ones without knowing they have a pfo) is 1:10.000 till 1:14.000. The increased risk is 1.6 till to 2.6. And not all people who get bent have a pfo, and the percent is not growing that 50% of the divers who get bent have a pfo.

I believe it is just when **** hits the fan. The risk in horseriding or skiing is much higher than in diving with a big pfo.

But because a lot of people think you have done things wrong, or you must have a pfo (is for a lot of people same as not being fit to dive) means that not every diver will talk about it. I think more divers got bent than that will be diagnosed. And I totally agree if you won't get the diagnoses of dcs because of the reaction of others.
 

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