Practice or Dangerous Practice

I've recently had a great long weekend at Oban. I was with a University Club, helping them take their new trainees in. It was hectic. We had 13 new trainees, some lingering trainees from past years and some qualified divers as well. We averaged 30 divers per day. We only had a few instructors there ranging from 3 to 7 so we were heavily loaded for training dives. I did 3 on the first day, four on the second, only surface work on the third and 2 on the last as we wanted to get home. All trainees got in the water more than once and we got lots of skills signed off. Altogether a really successful weekend and a lot of fun. Feeding everyone and keeping bottles filled were both big challenges. Puffin have a useful air system but they really need to do something about their A clamp bottle fittings. We blew quite a few O rings and talking to other divers there we were not the only ones. Each time cost us a fill at £4 plus an O ring. We don't get this problem using our own compressor.

Loch Creran where we spent one day training

 

But it was good fun except we had two bends. Now I've been diving for 32 years and have seen more bends this year than I've ever seen in the rest of my diving career. Is the air changing? In this case both bends involved ascent problems. One was a trainee lifting a victim for a rescue test at Loch Creran. The victim was indeed as he got the bend when the ascent was too fast and then repeated again, too fast. We put them all on the naughty step and monitored them and after 15 minutes the victim started to get hand problems. We put him straight on oxygen and contacted Aberdeen:

 

Diving emergencies and medical advice in Scotland: call 0845 408 6008 and ask for the on-call hyperbaric consultant.

After extensive consultation they instructed us to take him to Oban A&E where they called in a diving doctor. 5 hours on oxygen and the problem resolved and he was discharged. At midnight we took him back as the symptoms came back and he spent the night in the pot at Dunstaffnage. He is still waiting to start diving again. The doctor looked at his computer and said immediately the problem was the ascents.

The next day at The Slates three qualified divers were diving together when one ascended too fast. The most experienced grabbed her to slow her down and was pulled to the surface. He has had a bend before caused by a shunt (like a PFO) and therefore went through his own checks to see if he was ok. I never knew about this till later otherwise I would have put them all on the naughty step for monitoring. He thought he was ok but the next morning woke feeling poorly and reported into A&E in Edinburgh. They sent him to Aberdeen who treated him in the pot too. He now needs to consider his long term diving future.

Diving The Slates last year. One person on this trip ended up with a bend for a fast ascent. that was the first I saw from this cluster. It didn't emerge until the next day.

 

Within the club we have been discussing the problems that have occurred and trying to work out the causes and how to avoid them in the future. In the past year there have been three bends in the club all involving ascents. Partly this is caused by the trainees in the university swopping kit and changing weightbelts by guesswork. Different suits, underclothes, stabs, weightbelts every dive, not always fitting correctly is bound to cause buoyancy problems. But one of these was the exercise to lift someone for a rescue exercise involving people all diving with their own kit. No excuses here. Do we now consider this too risky? During treatment of both of the bends discussed the doctors were appalled to hear we still practice lifts. They consider it too high a risk for possible future gain. Is it?

As both BSAC and SSAC require lifts for qualifications this is a political argument that needs to be fought. However within the club we can reduce the risk a bit more by using a dummy instead of a real person as the victim. We do not have one but will rig it from a stab jacket, bottle, DV and weight belt. If they can lift that ok as though it was a person then we will switch on the surface to a real person. I'll let you know how we get on with this method.

Research on the subject of bends has led me into the area of non-symptomatic DCS. Dr Richard Pyle's work on this has been very illuminating. But that takes us further into deep diving and decompression and is for another time.