People ignoring dcs symptoms

[aquamarine1]

In my experience, yes it is easy to ignore. Initially I wrote off the numbing in my arm as a pinched nerve. Even when it moved to half of my face and tongue I ignored it. Thought I was just run down at the end of a week long liveaboard. As it turns out it had also affected my brain. Lucky my dive buddy realised my behavior was a bit off and the boat crew and subsequently DAN went into action. There was a LOT of denial involved - you really don't want to believe it is dcs!

 

[Texasguy]

For me on a liveaboard was always tiredness a factor. Especially closer to the end of the week. I started to sleep more between the dives and often it felt like tiredness came out of nowhere. Makes you guess..

 

[DTm]

So here's my experience take for what you will and make your own mind up.

On a dive boat not a live aboard - a cattle boat in Cozumel - Four groups of 6 on the boat.
After the first dive I notice one guy from one of the other groups who just could not sit still and looked very uncomfortable. After a minute or so of witching the guy and Boat DM's not noticing it and checking on him, I finally ask him if he was alright. He complained about pain in his low back and I believe it was his left hip. Also complained about numbness in the same leg (left I believe). It was sudden and started minutes after he got back on the boat. The exit/getting back on the boat after the dive was easy - long angled ladders in the water from the back of the boat not a lot of surface chop. He could walk on the leg but is was labored walk such that you would have if you had a hurt ankle or knee not like the whole leg was a dead weight. He was coherent - knew the day of the week, knew where he was, knew where he was staying, his home town, no slurred speech, or slow response to my "casual" questions. I asked him if he thought he might have taken a DCS hit - to which he and his wife's responded "what is DCS?". I said "you know the bends"? His and wife's response was "no, we did our safety stop". He attributed it to a back injury he previous had that had been gone for over a month. I asked if he had the numb,tingling leg with the back injury. He said no.
Over just a few minutes he complained about it getting worse and the numbness in the leg was now pain, everything was very painful - at that point I told him that if he did not say some thing to the crew, I would. He did and they started toward shore but he refused any treatment and to not make the second dive.

He did the second dive and lived. After, I asked him how he was feeling now. His response was "You know about five minutes after I got down, all that stuff went away and I feel much better now!"

I do not know whether it actually was DCS or his previous back injury that he just tweaked the right way while getting back on the boat. I know what I think, what do you think? Did he ignore the DCS symptoms and attribute it to a different injury?

I will also say this - I have around about 800 actual in the log book dives, there are more that I have not logged - that is the only time I think I have ever come close to what might have been DCS.

 

[Bob DBF]

He did the second dive and lived. After, I asked him how he was feeling now. His response was "You know about five minutes after I got down, all that stuff went away and I feel much better now!"

I do not know whether it actually was DCS or his previous back injury that he just tweaked the right way while getting back on the boat. I know what I think, what do you think? Did he ignore the DCS symptoms and attribute it to a different injury?

I'd be hard pressed to make that call, but if it was me, I'd figure DCS as that is not how my aches and pains progress. After hearing it resolved itself on a dive, I am leaning more towards DCS.

I had one DCS hit, increasing nasty joint pain during the SI. Due to the conditions, I tried an old school IWR and got away with it. Once I got to depth, the pain subsided and I spent the rest of the dive on deco stops. I would not recommend this to anyone who has a choice, I didn't.



Bob
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I may be old, but I'm not dead yet.

 

[KeithG]

Hey gang, Suspected DCS != Hypochondriac or Drama Queen (mostly).

If you have any suspicions, please get checked out by available experts. None (very few!) of us are medical experts. Got a pain. Ask for a second opinion. It will most often not be an issue, but if it is, please make sure it gets the proper attention.

I would rather have my dive vacation cut short because some idiot strained a muscle as opposed to not having any ICE cubes for the last few days of a trip because we need to keep the body cold (happened to a friend of mine...)

 

[Kitty_Kat]

From my experiences, most boat crews are very good at noticing symptoms that don't look quite right regardless of whether they indicate DCS...

One time when after I came up from doing a fairly deep dive (~40 m) that I had done many times before, I got pulled aside by a DM on the boat because he was concerned about my symptoms. What concerned him: I looked fatigued, had commented that my back and legs were sore, and had some strange bluish/purple bruises on the back of my neck and shoulders that he had glimpsed when i took my wetsuit top off.

The fatigue and soreness were easily explained by the fact that I had just climbed back on board with steel doubles in 1-2 m swells. I then had to explain to the nice DM (and everyone else on the boat deck) that the bruising was from a romantic tryst a couple days earlier . He agreed pretty quickly that I probably wasn't bent but still hasn't let me live it down.