What kind of diving accident?

[knotical]

The RSTC Guidelines for Recreational Scuba Diver’s Physical Examination Include as Severe Risk Conditions:

Neurological:
“History of Serious (Central Nervous System, Cerebral or Inner Ear) Decompression Sickness with residual deficits.”

Otolaryngological:
“History of vestibular decompression sickness.”

Cardiovascular:
“Venous emboli, commonly produced during decompression, may cross major intracardiac right-to-left shunts and enter the cerebral or spinal cord circulations causing neurological decompression illness.”

So the candidates seem to include at least: some types of serious DCS and/or something like a previously undiagnosed PFO. Of course it would depend on the specific damage, and how serious his physician felt the condition was.

Source document at: http://www.wrstc.com/downloads.php

 

[lamont]

there is a widely held belief among technical divers that once you take a hit you become much more likely to take a second hit. i've heard this several times, but haven't tracked down how plausible this theory is medically...

 

[BIGG_BUDD]

OK, so what happens if you had a bad DCS hit? How does it prevent you from diving again? I'm not familiar with the long term consequences of it.

Mislav,

Please don't take this the wrong way, but your dive profile says you've been to 70 meters, roughly 230 feet. Going that deep and not understanding the dangers of scuba is scary. Maybe you should pull back the throttle until you fully understand how potentially fatal this hobby can be.

No disrespect meant, just an observation.

 

[Cacia]

hmmm..interesting. Hypoxic tissue probably has cellular changes or something. I think I lean towards believing there are inherent anatomical variations in many of us that make us more susceptible to things like the physiological shunts, etc.


Of course, I am guessing, but that is fun. The propensity towards getting bent would be a tough study--so many factors.

Mislav is a very smart guy because he is not worried about the perception of others as much as gathering as much information as possible from many sources. That's what I have always thought about him. The wisest people I have known are those that forge ahead with information gathering even at the risk of ...giving some impression. You just have no control really of what people sumise about you, based on a question. There are "answer" people and there are "question" people...

The question he poses is a great one, IMV. At the very least it will be educational for many readers, no?

 

[ScubaTexan]

Luc Besson spent the first years of his life following his parents, scuba diving instructors, around the world. His early life was entirely aquatic. He already showed amazing creativity as a youth, writing early drafts of Grand bleu, Le (1988) and The Fifth Element (1997), as an adolescent bored in school. He planned on becoming a marine biologist specializing in dolphins until a diving accident at age 17 which rendered him unable to dive any longer. He moved back to Paris, where he was born, and only at age 18 did he first have an urban life or television. He realized that film was a medium which he could combine all his interests in various arts together, so he began taking odd jobs on various films. He moved to America for three years, then returned to France and formed Les Films de Loups - his own production company, which later changed its name to Les Films de Dauphins. He is now able to dive again.

 

[mislav]

Mislav,

Please don't take this the wrong way, but your dive profile says you've been to 70 meters, roughly 230 feet. Going that deep and not understanding the dangers of scuba is scary. Maybe you should pull back the throttle until you fully understand how potentially fatal this hobby can be.

No disrespect meant, just an observation.

It's ok, thank you for your concern. Of course I understand the dangers of Scuba and actually I'm a way better diver than my level suggests. The answers I'm looking for in this thread aren't something a regular diver would know, even at the instructor level. It's medical stuff.

Catherine, thank you. I'm speechless. (but touched and appreciative)

He is now able to dive again.

I know he is. Now. My question goes to the time when he was 17 and had an injury that made him change his career while not affecting his everyday life. I'm interested in knowing what kind of injury it might have been. The answers to this question should be very interesting to anyone who either has a career in diving or simply loves to dive.

Having read the answers from you guys, at this point I believe an ear drum injury sounds like the most plausible scenario.

 

[Quero]

One of my dive buddies--an instructor with thousands of dives--took an inner ear DCS hit, quite rare, I understand. He had months of periodic chamber treatments, and now, after 9 months, he still hasn't been cleared to get in the water (continues to have tinnitus and slight balance issues). I hope he will one day be able to dive again, but won't be surprised if it doesn't happen.

 

[Thalassamania]

There are differences of opinion, but in some circles a single DCS hit, embolism, or pneumothorax will disqualify you from future diving duty.

 

[do it easy]

This is just my interpretation, but perhaps he had a minor DCS hit, got better, and the doctor told him to stop diving. Something like this happened to Richard Pyle (pre-PhD) and he's still blowing bubbles with his rebreather. In The Last Dive, Bernie Chowdhury talks about how the doctors told him he would never dive again.

He explained to me that my injury was analogous to a shotgun wound to my spinal cord, and he made certain that I understood that many of my nerve cells had died forever. He explained that my recovery was not a result of new nerve growth, but rather a result of my brain learning new nerve pathways to send signals to the rest of my body. He explained how I was now much more susceptible to DCS, that a subsequent hit would very likely occur in my central nervous system, and that I had used up just about all of the "extra" nerve pathways in my spinal cord. He made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that if I continued to dive I would be much more likely to get bent, and that full recovery from such a hit would be much less likely. Basically, he did his best to convince me to give up diving for good.