Collecting Narcosis Stories

[Majickyl]

Hello all!

I'm putting together a presentation, part of which will involved a discussion of why helium is used by technical divers. The audience will be a mix of divers and non-divers, and I thought it might be particularly effective, especially for non-divers, if I relayed some first-person experiences describing nitrogen narcosis.

So...

What's your best narc'd story? Anyone have any "oh s**t" stories primarily attributed to nitrogen narcosis?

 

[corvettejoe]

I just check, double check and sometimes triple check things sometimes (gauge, computer, etc).
I feel in state like I'm pretty drunk if I'm deep enough. Much like I do when hanging out at a buddy's house, drank too much.. then need to go to the kitchen, use the bathroom, change video games, etc. I move a little slower, think/concentrate a bit harder on simple tasks and just take my time knowing my balance may be a bit off because of this.
I feel kind of the same way when narced really good. I just take it slower, concentrate harder, check things more than one time before I commit it to memory as fact.

I swear on one dive my SPG actually went UP instead of DOWN in pressure ... I was narced pretty good LOL

 

[SailNaked]

the one time I knew I was narced was at only 70 ft and I had checked my guages for depth and time about 4 times before I realized that I had no clue what my depth or time was.
another time was fairly deep and the buddy I was with asked what I thought about the boat we swam past, and I asked what boat?

for AOW our instructor asked us to add two numbers together, and on land it took about 2 seconds, at 90ft I was considering all the different way to add the numbers and thinking about carrying the one, and it took about 11 seconds to give my answer.

 

[TSandM]

I have two; both of them could have been deadly in different circumstances.

The first one was during a dive in my Cave 2 class. We were supposed to swim a line that would eventually make a left turn and end, and we were to jump forward onto the gold line and turn right, further into the cave. The passage was at about 95 feet, and I was diving Nitrox. I was leading. The whole dive was an anxious one, because the line was tied into the ceiling, which made it difficult to watch. When we got to the left turn, the line went on and T'd into the mainline, which was NOT what had been briefed. I sat and looked at it, and I knew it wasn't right, and it didn't feel right, and I didn't want to do it, so I waited a bit to see if anyone would turn the dive on gas. Nobody did, so I swam forward, cookied the intersection, and turned right. At that point, I got an "attention" signal from behind, turned around, and saw that the line had indeed ended, as we were told. What I was following was SOMEONE ELSE'S jump spool line -- they had jumped FROM the mainline to our line, and I had missed the tie-in and the spool altogether. Now, of course, this was a class, so the instructor knew I was being an idiot -- but BOTH of my teammates had looked at the spool (one swam over to look at it) and neither had signaled me. Had we gone on, and had the team that put the spool in taken it out while we were there, we would have been completely confused when we came back. It was Ginnie, and the mainline has no obstructions, so we wouldn't have been in real trouble -- but in another place, we could have been.

About six months later, I did a dive in Jailhouse in Mexico. This was a path we hadn't previously taken, briefed by the guy at the dive shop, and would send us into a deeper passage than we normally dive there. But since the max depth briefed was 85 feet, I thought it was okay. We were again on Nitrox. Instructions were to take a jump that would go down and eventually come to a T, at which we were to turn right. I was leading. We put the jump in, went down, and swam along. It got deeper than briefed, again to about 95 feet, where I swam up to a weird place where the line was tied to the wall. There was an arrow (pointing out, I did verify that), then a tie-in on the wall, and about twelve inches away, ANOTHER tie-in, and then the line went off to the right. I looked at it and thought, "Huh, that's weird. Why would somebody tie the line of twice on the wall like that?" I turned right and went about my dive . . . until my husband's "attention" signal brought me back to see I had just swum past the T we had been warned to watch for.

Both incidents had the same quality -- a "Huh?" reaction, and a feeling that something wasn't quite right, but no ability at all to think it through.

I don't go to 100 feet on Nitrox in caves any more. Those two incidents scared the stuffing out of me.

 

[wve]

My favorite is what happened to my wife on our first trip to Cozumel. We were novice divers at the time, and we were traveling with our instructor and his wife. We were both still trying to figure out how to dive, so we were doubly impressed that our friends were not only great divers, but seemed to be able to find all kinds of small critters.

On the first dive one morning, we were told to limit our maximum depth to 90 ft. A few minutes into the dive, I checked my gauge, and I was at 90 ft. I turned to look for my buddy only to discover that she was way below me! (Now, this is the woman who was scared of heights AND depths!) She wasn't paying any attention to any of us. The other wife had seen her fall behind me and descend, so she went down, nudged her and signaled her to go back up beside me.

Later, we asked her, "What were you doing?" She said, "I was determined to find some of those little creatures that Beverly is always finding." Nice, except that our instructor was recording the whole thing on video. And the video revealed that she was staring at a big patch of ... nothing!

For a few years thereafter, the biggest chicken in our group held the depth record at 120 ft.

Parenthetically, I should also explain that this event led to a discussion about how we would behave as a buddy team (who leads? where do we position ourselves? who goes first through a swim through? etc). It has never happened again.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

About six or seven years ago I was diving with my friend Jock at our local mudhole. We were swimming down a slope we refer to as "the drop-off" when he signaled me with his light and indicated that he was feeling loopy. I signaled back that we should level off here for a while, which we did. About 10 seconds later a sixgill shark came swimming upslope ... right towards us. I gave Jock the "hold" signal and we just hovered there for about two minutes while this shark ... maybe 9 feet or so in length ... swam lazily past us, checking us out. Then it turned and swam back downslope ... disappearing into the darkness. I looked at Jock and he had his thumb up ... which means make a direct ascent ... so I started to ascend. He got my attention and pointed upslope ... so I understood then he wanted to go in, and not make a direct ascent to the surface. We swam back upslope, did our safety stop, and headed in to shallow water. As we stood up he looked at me and said "Did we just see a shark?"

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[cloudflint]

One of my regular buddies lost one of his friends in a motorcycle accident. The day after his friends funeral he went out diving on a wreck sitting at about 30m. As he saw the wreck emerging out of the gloom, he looked over and saw the friend he had buried the day before standing on the deck of the wreck waving at him and smiling. Understandably he was quite put off by this so he ascended to a shallower depth and felt his head clear so decided to go back down and once again saw his friend standing on the deck of the wreck in the gloom smiling and slowly waving at him. Understandably he realised that he was suffering from a touch of narcosis and aborted the dive.

 

[tracydr]

I've had a few disturbing episodes. Once, in Bonaire, at about 130 feet, my head started to pound and I felt afraid, despite the warm,clear conditions.
I had a similar feeling in Catalina, but also developed vertigo, at 120 feet, although I think the cold and a loose hood may have had something to do with it.
Finally, I had an episode in Africa, where I went from 100-120 feet with no sense of depth, just lost my sense of awareness altogether until my buddy got my attention.
I really don't like the way I feel at depth and until I get trimix trained, I plan to stay at 100 feet. Unfortunately, I have a buddy who enjoys diving deep. He does, however, understand my concerns and will not dive deeper if I don't want to.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

One of my regular buddies lost one of his friends in a motorcycle accident. The day after his friends funeral he went out out diving on a wreck sitting at about 30m. As he saw the wreck emerging out of the gloom, he looked over and saw the friend he had buried the day before standing on the deck of the wreck waving at him and smiling. Understandably he was quite put off by this so he ascended to a shallower depth and felt his head clear so decided to go back down and once again saw his friend standing on the deck of the wreck in the gloom smiling and slowly waving at him. Understandably he realised that he was suffering from a touch of narcosis and aborted the die.

... now there's an interesting Freudian slip ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[boulderjohn]

I was in the engine room of a ship in Truk Lagoon with a buddy and a guide. We were 100 feet deep, and I was then using a conventional regulator and octo setup. The guide swam through a hole in the bulkhead, and I alertly saw that a small pipe was sticking down from the upper right side of the hole like a finger, and I alertly noted that it would be easy to catch the regulator hose on that. My buddy went through, and I alertly noted that his regulator hose caught on that pipe, and he had to pull it down to free it. I then went through, and I caught my regulator hose on the pipe. I asked myself, "Which hose is it that I caught, my regulator hose or my SPG hose?" I asked myself, "Do I pull it up or down to free it?" I said to myself, "These are really easy questions. I should know the answers to these questions. I must be narced."

In my earliest tech training, before switching agencies and being allowed to use helium below 100 feet, my buddy and I were doing a deco dive to 130 feet on air. We had been there quite a while, and I alertly noticed that my regulator was free flowing very slightly. I began to play with the adjustment knob, alertly trying to get the best flow without any free flow. I congratulated myself on my alertness--I was certainly not suffering from narcosis. Then a light flashed on me, signalling me that my buddy wanted my attention. He wanted to know why I was breathing from my alternate regulator. Sure enough, I was. My primary was neatly clipped off as it should be, so I had at some time in the past made a conscious switch for some reason. I had no memory of doing it, and I had no idea why I had done it. I know I had had some trouble with that regulator on the surface earlier, and I suppose I had switched to test it out. I suppose.

Note my overuse of the word "alertly." It is intentional. In both cases I not only felt fine, I was conscious of the fact that I felt fine and was feeling good about being so alert. The first one is the one that bothers me the most. The transformation from total awareness to total stupidity was so dramatic and fast, and it happened at only 100 feet. If I had not caught my hose, I would have completed the dive feeling that I had not been remotely impaired, even though I was very much impaired. More importantly, it gives me no confidence when my fellow tech divers talk about keeping their equivalent narcotic depths to 100 feet so that they can trust their minds to think clearly.