Oxygen Toxicity...

[TheDarknessLord]

I guess that NOAA is the key!They have a new edition (number 4)... I had the opportunity to read part of it because a friend has one, and is a book that every dive should has at home. you can find it at amazon.com; 90US$ brand new...

 

[Saturation]

TheDarknessLord once bubbled...
I guess that NOAA is the key!They have a new edition (number 4)... I had the opportunity to read part of it because a friend has one, and is a book that every dive should has at home. you can find it at amazon.com; 90US$ brand new...

A good text to own as an authoritative source for recreational diving and recreational nitrox. Mixes with He are evolving rapidly and so are decompression schedules, and what's in there on technical diving procedures is superficial and already dated.

There are many tidbits in there worth heeding, for example storing steel SCUBA tanks with low pressure to reduce the risk of oxidation and overkill, like 02 servicing for recreational nitrox regs [while it will set you back bucks, it won't hurt if you do it], but all things considered, its an authoritative text.

 

[ScubaSweet]

I've recently become Nitrox certified and was unable to get an answer from my instructor and other places concerning oxygen toxicity.

My question is as follows:

When can you continue to dive after experiencing oxygen toxicity?

Let's imagine that you feel fine after a "hit" and are not any worse for the wear, would it be 24hrs. per the Nitrox tables? As we all know, this is very different than getting the "bends", but it seems to me that if you were feeling fine and since the Nitrox tables basically state that your PO2 level readings start over after 24hrs., would this not be the case?

Any personal experiences or thougths that you could share?

uke:

Hope this is the right place to be asking this.

There is an old US Navy study on this subject. Remember the fix for narcosis is ascend till it goes away. Same with Ox Tox. The US Navy purposefully caused Ox Tox and there is video of it on youtube, however very hard to find I did watch it once a few weeks ago. The study said as soon as you feel the symptoms go away you are good with no long term effects. It's more about the pressure of the fractional gas than a build up in your system. By reducing the partial pressure of oxygen the symptoms will go away. Given how horrible the video looked, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to dive for a while, if I lived to dive again. This was tested in the 1940's by the US Navy. Not something anyone will likely ever test again. It was bad. Muscle contractions and spasms were like have a seizure.