Reverse Squeeze Help!!

[pipedope]

The trick on a reverse block is to go down a few feet to relieve the pressure, pinch and suck as you move up slowly.
Use jaw wiggle, chewing motions or other tricks that help you on the way down.

It is the mirror image of descent except the mirror is cracked.
You don't have to go down. You can choose to abort the dive and go another day.
Once you are down you Must come up.

It can help to have extra gas available to take off the time pressure. This makes it much easier to relax and slowly, carefully do what you need to get to the surface with ears undamaged.

The two times I have had bad reverse block I was surface supplied.
In one it was an hour to get from 20' to the surface.
In the other it was more than 2 hours from 40'.

not fun

The more you get good practice and learn to equalize easily with no pain at all and the more your body gets used to letting the air move as needed the easier and safer it is.

Even then don't dive with a cold.

 

[dumpsterDiver]

The trick on a reverse block is to go down a few feet to relieve the pressure, pinch and suck as you move up slowly.
Use jaw wiggle, chewing motions or other tricks that help you on the way down.

It is the mirror image of descent except the mirror is cracked.
You don't have to go down. You can choose to abort the dive and go another day.
Once you are down you Must come up.

It can help to have extra gas available to take off the time pressure. This makes it much easier to relax and slowly, carefully do what you need to get to the surface with ears undamaged.

The two times I have had bad reverse block I was surface supplied.
In one it was an hour to get from 20' to the surface.
In the other it was more than 2 hours from 40'.

not fun

The more you get good practice and learn to equalize easily with no pain at all and the more your body gets used to letting the air move as needed the easier and safer it is.

Even then don't dive with a cold.

Good advice. I sometimes suffer terribly from reverse blocks, it seems to only occur on scuba and it only happens in one ear. I drop down at the start of the dive, sometimes I allow myself to sink deeper than I need and then need to immediately come up just 10 feet and this can cause huge problems. Pain and sever dizziness. I have been nearly incapacitated and it has made me puke more than once underwater. It is a much bigger problem in shallow water, since small depth changes result in large relative changes in pressure. I've had a few times where I am coming up and think "well this is it, I'm going to blow an eardrum" but it has always cleared.

I once had a very severe reverse squeeze and the immediate cure is to shoot back down as fast as possible. The quicker the better! I experienced super bad dizziness and couldn't even see, everything was spinning (not fun on a solo night dive) but it resolved immediately when I got back down. Then, like one minute later (when I was feeling fine) I just started barfing, I guess hormones or something are released when you get hit so hard by it.

My solutions are:

Try to equallize gently on the way down

If you get a reverse squeeze, immediately go back down to a depth where there is zero pain and then try to very gently clear the ears (VERY slightly) over pressurize the ears and then re-start a slow ascent. This seems to re-open the tubes and lets you try again.

If that doesn't work,, then go down again and remove the mask and blow your nose.. this often helps clear the ears

For me, it is very important that I lower my jaw (essentially opening your mouth) on ascent; it sometimes makes the reg just about fall out of my mouth.

Also the pinch and suck method also seems to help a lot.

I have found that psuedophedrine sp? is a big help and I usually need to take some on consecutive days of diving. (There are many people that think this is a very BAD idea). So be careful.

 

[junior2725]

Am I am misunderstanding something here? If I felt pressure / pain in my ears during ascend, I would not ascend further until it clears (well, if it doesn't, at some stage I guess I will simply have to ascend in spite of the pain).

I was just trying to say that it seems to be a difficult problem because there is not much taught about how to get air to come out of the middle ear upon ascent. In open water class they tell you that when you are descending to ascend some and then try and clear again. Nothing is really mentioned about having problems on the ascent and what to do to solve this. Therefore what I had been taught obviously wasn't the solution to my problem.

 

[junior2725]

The trick on a reverse block is to go down a few feet to relieve the pressure, pinch and suck as you move up slowly.
Use jaw wiggle, chewing motions or other tricks that help you on the way down.

It is the mirror image of descent except the mirror is cracked.
You don't have to go down. You can choose to abort the dive and go another day.
Once you are down you Must come up.

It can help to have extra gas available to take off the time pressure. This makes it much easier to relax and slowly, carefully do what you need to get to the surface with ears undamaged.

The two times I have had bad reverse block I was surface supplied.
In one it was an hour to get from 20' to the surface.
In the other it was more than 2 hours from 40'.

not fun

The more you get good practice and learn to equalize easily with no pain at all and the more your body gets used to letting the air move as needed the easier and safer it is.

Even then don't dive with a cold.

Thanks for the advice. I will try this on my next dive. Ironically enough I have had a cold this past week and had to do some practice work in the pool today that I already had scheduled. What I think is funny is that of course I was very careful and went down very slowly coming up a little frequently to make sure that I was able to clear. I had a little trouble but was able to work through it. What I found ironic was that I had no problems with reverse squeeze. I will have to see how it goes on my next "real" dive after I get rid of this cold. Maybe if I am much more proactive about clearing on the way down I won't have such problems on the way up. That is my hope at least. THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR THE GREAT ADVICE!

 

[stefo2]

I was just trying to say that it seems to be a difficult problem because there is not much taught about how to get air to come out of the middle ear upon ascent. In open water class they tell you that when you are descending to ascend some and then try and clear again. Nothing is really mentioned about having problems on the ascent and what to do to solve this. Therefore what I had been taught obviously wasn't the solution to my problem.

I agree. But what you were taught was referring to pain on descend, so it seemed obvious to me that for pain on ascend you would have to descend back to the depth where there was no pain or at least stay at the depth and try all sorts of tricks mentioned above, but definetely not ascend further and try to equalise by blowing more air in!