CO in my tank over ~1000ppm, long term effects??

[Deleria]

Hi,
I live in Australia. My partner died 10th Aug from what is looking like CO in his tank (TBC...). We tested my tank with a hand held CO monitor and it was 670ppm, but the reader is only accurate to 20ppm, we expect it's actually over 1000ppm. I dive this tank for about 10 mins down to 27m. My partner indicated "I'm not feeling well, let's go up" I don't know the reading on his tank but I suspect they were similar. I had a splitting headache for 3 days, trembles and acute memory loss. I put it all down to stress. We didn't discover the tank issue until 3 weeks later.
Qu - memory issues, anyone know anything about this, as in will it resolve properly? It's pretty good now, for the first 3 weeks I was totally Dory, it was very alarming!
Qu- I gave blood last week but that would have been almost 5 weeks later, would anything be different serum, transaminase/ vitamin levels wise?
Qu- autopsy revealed nothing, samples were collected, now being checked for CO- given he was submerged for 20 hours at ~30m what could be detected?
Lastly, I'm trying to find a case report on a similar case I was told it was on the east coast of the USA. I want to read details, outcomes, recommendations etc. Can anyone help me with that?
thanks in advance

 

[pasley]

Sorry for the loss of your friend.

Divers Alert Network has an extensive library of all dive related medical issues. See Breathing Gas Contamination for starters.

 

[KevinNM]

I'm so sorry about the lost of your friend. You are lucky to be alive.
Here are some links to long-term effects -but I'm not a doctor - you should contact a specialist physician

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2707118/
Have you ever wondered whether you could make the diagnosis of carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning? Have you ever wondered how you should best treat the signs and symptoms of CO poisoning? Have you ever wondered whether there would be long-term consequences of CO poisoning and how they could be treated? If you have, then the following case vignette and review of the literature should serve to highlight aspects of CO poisoning and its complications.

http://www.jpands.org/vol11no2/neubauer.pdf
Severe neurologic impairment may occur as a result of carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, even after apparent recovery from the acute event. In four cases of late neurologic sequelae, significant improvement occurred with hyperbaric oxygenation therapy (HBOT). Improvement in brain metabolism shown by single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) paralleled the clinical response to HBOT. More aggressive use of HBOT for the acute injury might prevent these late sequelae.

 

[clownfishsydney]

My condolences for your loss.

In my experience (28 years and 3,800+ dives), CO as a cause of a problem in a diving accident in Australia is extremely rare.

See http://www.divingmedicine.info/Ch 23 SM10c.pdf for more details about CO toxity, written by the diving medicine expert, Dr Carl Edmonds. He is a friend of mine, so if you can get access to Andrew's autopsy, I am happy to send to Carl to get his views.

According to this, at 800 ppm you would have headaches, dizziness, nausea and breathlessness with exertion. As your tank shows something similar in ppm, then this is probably confirmation considering your symptoms, but I would have thought they should have disappeared by now.

Was your tank filled by the same operation at the same time as your partner (or hired from the same place)?

Anyway, let me know and I will help if I can.

 

[DandyDon]

CO as a cause of a problem in a diving accident in Australia is extremely rare.

Or just rarely discovered, because tanks are rarely tested, even with fatalities. One of the leading air testing laboratories stated that 3% of the samples sent to them failed safe levels, often horribly, and that's only of the fill stations that bother sending samples as that's actually not required, so with the poor rate of discovery in our industry - it's really only guess work. It does get boring testing every tank when you always get zeros, until you find your first tainted tank. Deleria's symptoms were so obviously similar to CO poisoning, but it seems that the professionals there failed to suggest hyperbaric treatment. I just don't know if such treatment would help now, after so long, and will be looking forward to professional medical opinions here.

I am very sorry to hear of Deleria's accident, injury and personal loss, but glad that someone actually thought to test her tank, had or found a tank tester that could test for CO, and that tank air samples have been submitted so we can learn from this tragedy. Usually, tanks are just drained as a caution, destroying evidence.