The Last Dive's Chrissy Rouse -- would he have survived today?

[minamin13]

I recently finished "The Last Dive" by Bernie Choudhury(sp?).

I can't help thinking that they botched Chrissy Rouse's recompression treatment. If he had gotten bent today, would he be able to survive?

From what I remember, Chrissy Rouse was regaining feeling in his limbs and speaking coherently until they decided to depressurize him from 160 feet to 60 feet, at which point he lost consciousness and died.

Shouldn't they have kept him at 160 feet for a few days, if possible, rather than sticking to the standard Navy protocol and keeping him there for only a few hours? Could someone illuminate me on this?

 

[426Scuba]

I think the extra 20 minutes to load his dad on the chopper added a lot to the whole problem

 

[mania]

I'm not sure but if I remember well there were probably some mistakes done. And probably this is the reason why parts of the documentation is lost.
Mania

 

[Kim]

Who can tell? Sure there was some time lost etc - but the deco that they blew through was huge.

 

[Walter]

He was probably already dead by the time he hit the surface, his body just didn't know it yet. It's been a few years since I read the book, but if memory serves, the medical opinion was there was not an available chamber that could recompress to the pressure necessary to successfully treat him. The other thing to consider is the massive tissue damage that had already taken place. Would it have been possible for him to live with the damge already done? I don't know the answer, but I wouldn't want to live with injuries of that magnitude.

 

[MB]

Keep in mind that whenever you enter into the emergency services realm, things aren't always clean and predictable. This is even more the case when emergency services have to deal with massive trauma. Now add factors invovling remote location, time and transportation difficulties to a treatment facility, etc.

This was not a simple or minor bends hit - these guys presented gigantic challenges to life support. Their profiles and decompression violations were enormous. Even if they had immediate and top quality care available, the odds were stacked against them - in a very big way.

 

[RIOceanographer]

I was at the Boston Sea Rovers show last year and the doctor who treated him was a speaker.

During his talk he discussed the case and he said that they were essentially dead men the second they hit the surface, and that it was pretty amazing that he even reached the hospital. He said it was such an extreme case that when they tried to take a blood sample from him, what they got in the vial was to use his word "foam" rather than blood. He said this was causing the blood to clot right in his veins, and the resulting damage was irreversible long before he arrived at the facility.

 

[Diver0001]

I recently finished "The Last Dive" by Bernie Choudhury(sp?).

I can't help thinking that they botched Chrissy Rouse's recompression treatment.

I can certainly understand how you could get that impression from the book but it should be made clear that the fatal mistakes were made by the divers, some of them before they ever got on that boat..... From the little I know about the bend itself my impression is that it simply wasn't treatable.

The thing that would have saved his bacon today is that attitudes have changed. There is more peer pressure towards safety and control and divers are somewhat less likely to accept those kinds of risks.

R..

 

[amascuba]

From what I understand the only real attitudes were the attitudes of the father and son towards each other. I've seen father/son relationships like that. It's the way some people bond. When Chris went to find out where his son was and tried to lift the cabinet off him, that was apart of being a good buddy, but missing the deco stops were their fatal mistakes. I don't completely remember why they missed the stops. Wasn't it because Chrissy was getting short on air and shot to the surface and the Chris followed to try to stop him?

 

[mheaster]

In light of everything else they went through with narcosis and entrapment; they got disoriented and could NOT locate the spot they had left their Stage bottles/Deco gas they REQUIRED for their ascent. That is why they blew through their deco!

Neither of them had anywhere near enough enough gas to perform a proper ascent/deco.