In scuba class they drill you about lots of things; air use,
buoyancy, nitrogen saturation, natural and man-made hazards. The one
thing every one seems to know about before and after and during and
if they have never been scuba diving is the bends. The bends is when
gas comes out of solution in your blood because you come up to
quickly and bubbles get stuck in your body where bubbles should not
be. It is actually fairly rare but so dangerous that you practice
preventative measures all the time to prevent it from happening. With
the constant pressure or the bends scare tactics it was always in the
corner of my mind while I was diving which is probably a good thing.
On my very first dive trip to the ocean there was a woman who was on
the trip with her husband but she was not feeling well because she
had a cold. Her husband who had paid quite a bit to take this trip
was upset that she wasn't diving. So she took some cold medicine and
got in the water which went okay for the first couple of dives. By
the second day she was feeling really rough and should not have been
diving but she got back in. My dad and I were finishing our dive and
when we surfaced we saw everyone on the boat hauling this lady out of
the water and generally panicking. We held back a little while they
loaded her up and onto a stretcher before we got out. We found out
from the others that she had been diving and she coughed up something
and it made her panic and she acceded too fast and she had the bends.
My dad had spent most of our time discussing the bends telling me
that it was not that common and that in almost 30 years he had never
seen someone get it. Then there we were on my very first trip and a
lady was in a very bad way. We were all ordered to stay at the back
of the boat while they took her to the front and started working on
her the best they could while a medivac helicopter flew over from the
navy base that had a decompression chamber about 40 miles away. They
had cut off her wetsuit and swimsuit and were trying to help her
breathe with oxygen. We were supposed to stay out of the way but I
wanted to see if she was alive. I honestly couldn't tell. At that age
I thought I wanted any opportunity to see a naked woman but it turned
out that I was wrong. Her gray skin and her convulsing made me feel
panicked and sad. I was very scared that she was going to die and I
was caught in that horrible conflict of tragedy where you want to see
what is happening and you don't want to see what is happening. When
the helicopter came we all had to go below decks to keep from being
hit by debris so we didn't get to see her picked off the deck. They
lowered a tether about fifty feet long and picked up the stretcher
and flew to the hospital with her dangling below. We were all a
little hesitant to keep diving so the captain just moved the boat for
a couple of hours until the naval base called and told him that the
lady was doing great and that she was decompressing and was going to
take a boat from there to L.A. When she was better. That good news
made us all feel much better and we stopped to dive. She got out and
met her husband at the dock when we arrived all better it seemed but
I heard later on their flight home that she had a problem and they
had to land the plane to get her help. Spooky.
