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Greetings to everyone on the techdiver email list. After over a year of silently lurking its probably time to introduce myself to the list. My name is Don, and I live in Austin Texas. I'm a 41 year old electrical engineer who makes a living designing integrated circuits. My wife is a EE who designs PowerPC microprocessors for Motorola. I started diving in 1991 and have logged slightly less than 100 dives in the past 8 years. My first introduction to scuba was CMAS, but I got recert'd by PADI so that I could convince my wife to get certified. Two years ago we did the AOW and rec Nitrox certs through PADI and TDI. Oh yeah, and for you tri-atheletes, we run 2-3 miles three times a week. Not quite 5 miles/day, but we're not couch potatoes either. We've got scubapro gear (MK20/G500 mains, R190 & Air2 spares) with standard scubapro BC's set up for singles. I occasionally solo dive, so I've got a 30 cf pony which I mount upside down off of my main as a redundent supply (for solo dives only... otherwise the extra weight is not worth the bother). This gear was all purchased before I subscribed to this list. BTW, I used to design military avionics for Boeing, so I have some experience in assessing failure points and adding redundency to increase system reliability. Oh yeah, and I spent ~two years designing ultrasound machines for Siemens so I know a little about doppler echocardiography and bubble studies. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The above is all for the archive records, so that when you call me a "sorry-assed college boy puke stroke who's dumber than shit and farm animal stupid" you can add in some of the relevant details :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Now my first piece of (hopefully) useful information: Everyone on this list probably knows that a Patent Foramen Ovule (PFO) is a small hole in the muscle walls between the chambers in your heart and that its bad for technical diving because it lets bubbles which normally form in your veins flow through into your arteries without passing through your lungs (where they would be expelled). You probably also know that bubbles in your arteries are a bad thing because while the veins start out really small (at the body tissues) and get bigger and bigger as they get closer to your heart, the arteries are big at the heart, and get smaller and smaller as they go to the body tissues. The bubbles can block off a small arterial branch and oxygen starve all of the organs etc that are fed off of that branch. You probably know that approximately 30% of people have a PFO and are consequently predisposed to a bends hit. <tidbit of useful information starts here> You can find out for sure whether you have a PFO by having tiny bubbles in saline solution injected into one of your veins while watching your heart in real-time on ultrasound. The bubbles show up clearly on the images, and if any of them cross the muscle there's a hole. You should be under some kind of muscle strain at the time to make sure that you don't have the kind of PFO that is normally closed, but opens under strain. (If you don't have an ultrasound machine and syringe in your garage, a good cardiologist can assist you for the price of two new MK20/G500's) Did everyone already know this? Thanks in advance for your feedback on any or all of the above, however if you just call me stupid without providing any helpful information you can....... .......... Uh, .........stroke me. Later, Don W. -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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