Secondary Victims

Over the last few days I have had the same conversation with four different divers and instructors I respect enormously. Several of them about the same couple of divers.

There are a couple of divers out there that are going to die diving. Possibly soon. And they don't know it yet.

They certainly don't behave like they care. They seem to refuse to take the advise of their betters or agree to the long, slow process of mentorship. All they seem to think is, "I am preternaturally good at this and, besides, I'm only putting myself at any risk." They are 100% wrong.

As "technical" diving has become more mainstream over the last decade people have grown hell-bent for leather to reach the very top of the game. They see the empty spools, the gorgeous pictures, or the piles of brass that the rockstar divers bring back and they figure, "If I push really hard I can be doing that in a year or two!"

But they can't.

They selectively ignore that the rockstars have been slowly becoming who they are and what they're capable of for 10, 15, 20, 30 years. They don't think of the countless called dives or minor incidents or long-forgotten learning moments that these people have built their careers upon. They don't romanticize the hours of planning dives and bailout and emergency plans. They don't think of the support required. They just figure, "What's the worst that can happen? I die doing what I love?"

No. The worst that can happen is that you hurt or kill someone else because of your own bullshit ego trip.

When you die underwater you leave buddies who question, "What more could I have done?" You have rescue or recovery teams who have to go get you and carry around the memory of the dead look in your eyes as they find you floating there in their heads forever. Every instructor you've ever worked with (at least those worth a shit) will spend YEARS questioning every moment they worked with you and whether it was their fault for having certified you at all.

You have their families who certainly never signed on for this who suddenly have to become an emotional support network for those who were anywhere near your accident in any capacity. Strangers; people who you may never meet. People who now lose sleep worrying about their own loved ones.

Because you can't accept that you're not as good as you think you are. Because you decided to jump from the very peak of Dunning-Kruger mountain.

Slow down. Don't create secondary victims. You selfish dingbats.

Maybe one day you'll get to where you want to be. Maybe. But it should take longer than you think it should.

Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right (but three rights do make a left)

There are two pictures on the internet right now.  Almost identical: a diver sits on a boat, smiling at the camera, breathing oxygen to mitigate a minor DCS hit.  I don't know the circumstances of either incident, but as I saw each I had a very different reaction.

The one I saw first I thought, "Now that's pretty funny."  To the other I thought, "That is terrifying."  

Bear in mind, there really is very little different from photo to photo.  Both divers are safe and comfortable back on board their boat, both look in fine spirits, and most importantly, both apparently walked away from whatever incident precipitated first aid without any residual effects.  So it's the same picture; nothing different; except for everything.

In the one picture is one of the most experienced divers you'll find anywhere.  The other is of a relative newbie.

So in the one picture is someone who should have known better, or had something unavoidable happen, or wasn't hydrated or was over-hydrated, or inadvertently had any number of countless other variables in the barely-understood physiology of decompression stress bite him in the ass.  Or maybe it was nothing... just one of those days.  Like a pro athlete sometimes steps down wrong without even noticing it at the time, but pulls something in their leg... if you're diving at a certain level for long enough every once in a while divers get minor injuries, too.

The other diver has NOT been diving at that level long enough.  And when I say "long enough" I mean "at all."  So what frightened me is the smirk.

Why should someone with suspected symptoms of a potentially debilitating injury be smiling into the camera when they have not been around long enough to have any frame of reference about what is happening to them?  Let's drop a mental bookmark there and flip to a different chapter for a bit.

Recently I was testing a different set of counterlungs on my rebreather, these sleek neoprene jobbies.  Thing was, there was nowhere on them to stow my oxygen and diluent pressure gauges with them over my shoulders the way I usually do.  The number of times I check my gauges on a normal dive I can count on one hand.  Sometimes on only one finger.

So I removed them for the dive.

Rebreather divers, on reading that, are now having one of two reactions.
A) You goddamn fool!  Diving without gauges?!  I'm amazed you're still alive!!
B) So?  I took my gauges off forever ago.  Just one more hose and more failure point.
If there are people with some reaction in the grey zone between those two opinions I am not aware of their existence.

I started this particular dive with a pretty good handle on my oxygen consumption that comes from almost a decade of CCR experience.  I was also perfectly comfortable that in only 60 feet of water there was no way I was going to be able to use the entirety of the 2L bottle of dil.  The dive itself was lovely.  Until...

"PSSSHT!" said my solenoid.

Then, a few minutes later, "PSSSHT!"

"PSssh...." some time after that.

"What the fuck was that?" some functionary toward the back of my consciousness said.

"What was what?" said my conscious mind absently.

"Shut up!  Listen!" said the functionary.

(Yes, I imagine the inside of my mind like Mission Control, and the guy who noticed an issue is in charge of some lower system that no one usually cares about, but right now he's pushed back all the papers on his desk and is standing up in fixed concentration.  All eyes in the room are on him.)

"pssh..." said the solenoid.

"That!  Did you hear that?"

"Yeah, we heard it," says Ed Harris, now standing and straightening his vest.

"CLICK," said the solenoid with finality.  "CLIIIIIIIICK," and again with a lot more oomph.

Ed Harris adjusts his headset and sighs, "OK, people, we've got us a situation.  Let's stay calm and work the problem."

Here's the thing.  I had started the dive with a good grasp on my oxygen metabolism -- I had also started the dive with a minor leak out of the tank valve.  It had been there for a day or two, a nearly insignificant little bleed, and I had intended to tell the place I rented the tank from about it toward the end of the week.  I didn't want to be the asshole customer who insists you overhaul shit for me on the spot when the failure was so small, so until then I figured it wasn't impacting me poorly.

BUT... this was the dive that the tiny leak decided to escalate to a major leak.  So it was on this dive that I ran completely out of O2.

I signaled to my wife asking whether the bubbles she had pointed out were still there?  She smiled when she signaled back, "No," certainly thinking that the problem had resolved.  She stopped smiling when I signaled, "It's because that tank is empty."

She held up a questioning thumb and I signaled, "No, the spool I dropped at our exit was just over there."  So we swam back to the spool, collected it, and exited normally.  Well... normal-ish; I had a regulator in my mouth by the time we hit the surface.  Before putting the regulator in my mouth I admit using a couple of unconventional tools to complete the dive staying on the loop for as long as possible.
Mostly I was grateful to that little functionary at the back of the attic of my mind who was listening to the solenoid.  Always recognizing what "normal" sounds and feels like and instantly recognizing when something not normal has just happened.  It has taken a long time to get there but just as when you can feel when your sock has twisted and the seam is pressing against your pinky toe, so is some little part of my mind always monitoring the solenoid.

I didn't know for sure that was true until this dive.

I had hoped.  And I am delighted as hell to know that it is true; that I detected the problem even before my PO2 started dropping.

Can you?

I am sure a great many of you reading this could (assuming fucking anyone is reading this).  But I am also sure a great many can not.

I have been doing this a while.  Longer than some, no where near as long as others.  But long enough that some things are second nature.  Long enough that I've been exposed to a great deal of the diving world.  Long enough that I've seen friends bent.  Long enough that I've had minor DCS hits myself.

And with that let's go back to where we bookmarked.

It takes time and experience to get to where you can or should be comfortable with certain things or having a fair gauge of what's normal and what isn't.  If I was a brand new rebreather diver who ran out of O2 would I have noticed?  Would I have even lived?  People have died for less, but even as I knew what was happening I viewed it mostly as a minor inconvenience.

The couple of times I have felt symptoms of DCS it scared the crap out of me.  I knew I probably wasn't going to die... but I damn sure didn't like it.  And I damn sure wasn't in the mood to pose for pictures.
"So why," I thought, "Is this inexperienced diver sitting there smiling at the camera, happily accepting that they are showing signs of DCS?"
Lest anyone think I am simply picking on this one person in this one photo, I have heard and overheard a conversation like, "I got so bent," a number of times from people who really should't have had that happen at that point in their dive career.  Or, more to the point, at all!  

Just as often as not the reason these folks got hurt is not because of an "undeserved hit," but because they were doing some shit they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.  

The reason I think of it now was the surprising contrast, the almost double-standard, I found in my reaction to those two pictures.
Is it a perceived badge of honor to newbies?  Is it about the perception of being a bad-ass diver?  Do they think that in getting "hit" they have now achieved some level of credibility, that they are closer to the same level as the wildly experienced diver in a similar circumstance?  Don't they recognize that's not how it works?  That there's not even an "it" to work like that?

I wonder if it is like inexperienced CCR divers who take their pressure gauges off because some person they respect told them that pressure gauges are for babies?  They forget that the person telling them, "You don't need them," is someone who knows exactly their metabolism level to two decimals of LPM given any range of workloads* when they, themselves, barely remember the basics of emergency procedures.

(* I do not claim to be one of these people.  I am back to my normal counterlungs and my pressure gauges are back on.  I don't think you're going to die without them... I just like having them there.  A tool I probably won't use, but doesn't bother me when they're just sitting there not being used.)

Diving is not a competitive sport.  There are no ranks, there are no secret handshakes, there is no reason to try to be bigger, meaner, tougher, deeper, or more cavalier about being bent than the next guy.

If you are going to stay in the sport for long enough, yes, things are going to happen.  Sometimes bad things.

My original rebreather instructor sat me down before accepting me as a student and told me, very soberly, that if I was going to start doing this I was going to have to accept that I was going to lose friends.  What's more, I was going to have to accept that I may, myself, die doing it.  

It did not spark any ember of bravado in me.  Sadly and inevitably, it turned out that he was right.  

Because he was right I get really upset when I see people doing things like moving too fast or diving too ambitiously.  It's why I make this same blog post bitching about how people need to slow the fuck down and dive more cautiously over and over again.

Of course taking chances are essential to growth, but zealous growth can be dangerous.

Think about tomatoes.  Do you ever think about tomatoes?  I'm Italian and it's the season right now; I think about tomatoes frequently.  When they grow large they can spread out and you get a ton of flowers which turn into a ton of tomatoes.  But a tomato plant needs a trellis.  You need to be careful to make sure that you keep the plant comfortably within an appropriate frame and that it doesn't grow to fast.  Otherwise it will probably fall over and die.

Learn slowly.  Learn over time.  Dive safe.  And eat a lot of tomatoes.  They're really good for you.



(Thanks to Tom McCarthy for "donating" the questionably uncopyrighted image above.)