Should you have to dive with Nitrox before getting Nitrox certified?

[drrich2]

Diving off the Outer Banks, to 100+ feet to see wrecks, and hitting a 25 minute NDL on EAN30 has happened to me several times now. Back on the boat with 900 - 1300 psi. It would REALLY suck if I were diving air....

I, too, found the deep offshore wrecks out of Morehead City, NC to make a good case for nitrox EAN 30. Each day a staff member would ask if anyone was diving air; offhand I don't recall seeing anyone speak up. Typical dive briefing would be something like 110 feet to the sand, give or take, and being wreck diving without surrounding reef, there wasn't a large variation in 'multi-level' diving.

Another location that benefited was drift diving out of Jupiter, Florida, with Jupiter Dive Center. Typical dive briefing included '...90 feet to the sand...,' which explains why 36% was the popular mix.

Richard.

 

[NAM001]

Excellent Post. This is why i can ont comprehend why people say there is no effect of nitrox and feeling better. I feel better with nitrox. I have also been tested and have results suggesting COPD. Sounds like a good reason to feel better or not as worse as with diving air. An old neighbor gets tired when she goes to the mail box or the grocery store and back for feels much better when she wears her O2 tank for the trip. So I think,,, too many say no benefit to nitrox based on only their physical condition. To say globally it has no effect is perhaps too narrow minded of a comment. I have long suspected that if you do feel better after nitrox than with air it is perhaps a symptom of something else. I have dove with others that say they feel better also. They are desk jockies at work and get very little exercise compared to others. I for one was stuck in a submarine for years. not a lot of chance for jogging in the park for girls. So many have been panting after running a 1/4 mile track after getting n port. After a couple of weeks they were back to running a couple of miles and not extreemly winded. I also find that my ;ulse returns to normal much quicker than when i dive air and have to make a transit to and from the water.




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I got my Nitrox card right after I finished OW, before I did my first non-training dive. In my first 30 or so dives, over half of them were with Nitrox. Of those, I had a number of dive days where, by the end of the 2nd dive or immediately thereafter, I got a bad headache. Sometimes it started while I was still in the water. Sometimes, it came on just after I got out. BAD headaches. Narrow vision. Slight nausea. On every occasion but one where I got a headache, I had been diving air. One dive day in the Outer Banks, in July, I dove Nitrox and did get a headache afterwards, but it was not nearly as bad as previous occasions.

I was concerned about it all enough that I went to my doctor about it starting around May, I think. I have now had an Echocardiogram to screen for PFO (don't have it, but was afraid microbubbles might be crossing my heart and going directly to my brain to cause the headaches), and a CT scan of my sinus cavities, and been to an ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist, who happens to be an experienced scuba diver himself). The explanation seems to be that I have had acute sinusitis (and relatively frequent sinus infections), apparently due to mild allergies. Basically, I have had just a slightly drippy nose for so long that I was taking Zyrtec every day and no longer even noticing my own occasional *sniff* because of a little tiny bit of runny nose. The ENT looked at everything and scoped my sinuses and said I had chronically inflamed mucosal(?) tissues in my sinus cavities.

I am now off the Zyrtec and taking Flonase every day. The ENT said Zyrtec would thicken the mucosal lining and make it harder to equalize my sinuses. I did a course of steroids for my sinuses. And, at my ENT's direction, I'm using Afrin (a decongestant) every morning of a dive day. Since I switched to daily Flonase and Afrin on dive days, I have not had any post-dive headaches (in roughly 15 dives). But, I have also only been diving Nitrox - except for some short, shallow dives on air.

So, I feel like the primary problem with my headaches was deep internal sinus congestion. But, a contributing factor to headaches versus not seems to be whether I was on Nitrox or not. I can only speculate, but it seems like the enriched oxygen content in the Nitrox may have been, in some way, making up for the clogged sphenoid sinuses I had. I don't really know.

What I DO know is that, in addition to the other possible explanations for your headaches, it could also be sinus congestion. And the congestion can be in other sinus cavities than your Frontal or Maxillary cavities - i.e. your Sphenoid or Ethmoid sinus cavities, in which case you might not even realize you were congested there. I didn't.

---------- Post added September 12th, 2015 at 01:46 AM ----------

I agree with no dives necessary. The best part of the course for me was. calculating best gas for the depth. the function of PPO2 becoming a real factor when using other than air. The consequences you are exposed to when others fill your tank. tank checking protocol's. The most annoying part was the EAD stuff.