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>Stay away from that stuff if you want to go diving.... >A buddy of mine got very panicky (hell, out of his mind) >at 120 ft due to the SIDE EFFECTS of the stuff. He >did not tell me that he had taken it before the dive..... >We came to an understanding <G> when he informed >me <later> about taking that stuff before the dive. >The stunt he pulled could have gotten us BOTH killed. Defense rests... I don't mean to sound glib. I don't think anyone here was arguing *for* taking sudafed and diving...we're just sitting around, scratching and sharing war stories rationalizing how we've cheated death with sudafed and gotten away with it. ;-) (aviators love to do this...I see divers do too!) Seriously though, your friend might have had one of those idiosyncratic reactions (only typical for him) or an outright, previously documented side-effect of the drug at depth...either way you can't tell (and it doesn't matter anyway once he starts thrashing around down there!). But that's the whole point...you don't know if and when it's going to happen to you or your buddy. So why chance it? Makes a dive sound too much like a crap shoot. This whole area of drug effects at depth is a real can of worms. The truth is we docs really don't know how and why things react badly in the body at depth when they seem to work perfectly well on the surface. We can rationalize after the fact and throw around scientific jargon and ratonalize but the truth is we're still left with anecdotal evidence. (my forensic pathology collegues here at AFIP call these diving accidents "chokes". Unlike an aircraft mishap that you can physically reconstruct and figure out what went wrong (what part broke, what procedure failed, etc) diving accidents frequently have no eyewitnesses and all end in the same physical results...a drowned diver) Man has evolved for millions of years at 1 atm, 1 G, 21% O2 and standing upright. You're now asking me to trick my semicircular canals by going weightless, breath from a pressurized bottle, compress my bod with nearly 10 atmospheres of pressure and saturate my tissues with gases usually found in party balloons, and you wonder why drugs don't work like the book says? It's a wonder they work at all! Now I'm sure that the real hyperbaric medical docs (which I am not) have a better handle on this, but having looked in the same books, maybe not that much better. (writer ducks as blunt object is thrown at head!) In Naval Aviation we have a procedures and safety manual for every aircraft we fly called "NATOPS" (Naval Aviation Training & Operational Standards) each has been rewritten over the years after way too many crash investigations once we found out what went wrong to reflect changes in those procedures or design changes in the aircraft. We have a saying that "NATOPS has been written in blood". Because it literally has! I'm coming to the same conclusion that the "Dive tables were also written in blood" (dive tables in this case being all the safety do's and don't's). While as a laboratorian I'd love to find nice clean causes and effects for everything, the body's just too complex a place to do that sometimes. So we're just left with anacdotes like this one. It doesn't make them any less valuble. (actually *more* valuable since you were able to come back and tell us what you saw) The alternative is two drowned divers and the rest of us scratching our heads wondering what happened. Didn't mean to encroach on DAN's turf. They've been doing this a lot longer and I'm sure a lot better than me. I guess you can take a flight surgeon out of ops but you can't take ops out the flight surgeon! Sorry for the "oral free-flow" Robb Wolov
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