Welcome to the DiveBunnie Blog! Bear with me whilst I just find out about the finer details of making my blog a little prettier.
Ok, so I am working from a slightly old, but loved lappie, which means that using some of the functions here on the deepstop is a little quirky. So for now, I am gonna stick with the basic theme here.
Well I had my first case of a guest with decompression sickness yesterday, and thank God for our training. Thankfully, she spoke up and told us within minutes of her first symptoms, so we could get her laying down, put her on 100% oxygen, reydration salts and call the doctor, all of which definitely helped improve her condition. I would like to say a huge thank you to the Sharm el Sheikh search and rescue team who came out to meet us within half an hour, which is pretty spectacular considering we were near the Dunraven wreck (over two hours away by normal dive boat speed) and another thank you to Dr Ahmed at the chamber here, who had our lady in the pot within 15 minutes of her arrival at the centre.
The diver will be fine and her first two hour recompression treatment was successful, however she does have a suspected PFO which will make her prone to decompression sickness and therefore preclude her from diving without further treatment, if that is indeed the condition.
I am just sooo glad that she did speak up enabling us to get her onto the important oxygen. Just seeing the improvement that a combination of that and rehydration did, was quite astounding. At least it held everything at bay until we got her safely to the chamber and back under compression.
Well we have a solar eclipse on its way and I am not working. So… a group of us are headed for the beach with our special solar shades (being brought by Disco Dave) to view the sun’s disappearance. I did see the eclipse that hit the UK in 1999, however in usual UK style the sun was totally obscured already by the usual leaden grey clouds, so, whilst it was still pretty awesome, we were not able to actually see the shadow of the moon itself. Sadly I was not quite in Cornwall either, so it wasn’t 100%.
This time I did have ambitious plans of busing it up to North West Egypt to witness the full totality in glorious clear skies, however when I looked at the map, I realised with the slight lack of motorways here, the journey was likely to take around 30 hours!
So… Terrazzina beach it is for us. We will get 75% and the earlier clouds have done us the favour of departing, so it should still be pretty cool to see.
So we have an adopted cat in our building… Betty. OK we resisted giivng her a name for ages, not wanting to acknowledge that she had become a part of our little family. We also made sure that she never spent the night in any of our apartments. Well she is essentially a feral cat, she just happens to have mastered the art of being friendly and cute, and we didn’t want her to become to dependent on us. I think she had realised that if she was friendly she would get fed. Well she is now very pregnant… hmm guess she got a bit too friendly with one of the boy cats around here. And, as a result she is totally hormonal, so lashed out at me when I tried to pick her up the other day to put her outside. I am very lucky she didn’t get my eye, as she ripped a bit of my eyelid. I now feel the guilty one though, as she has now been banished from the flats, but doesn’t quite understand why. Hence she has been miaowing outside my apartment for the last 12 hours! I feel dreadful, like I am going to be a part of destroying her faith in people. I guess once she has had her babies, she will calm down a bit and once again will be the lovely little cat we all came to know and love. At the moment, she is verging on the psyco scary cat! Of course things would be much easier if I was just at work so didn’t have to deal with any of this. We need some more guests so that all the instructors are working. Having said that though, I am quite enjoying a bit of a break for a change.
Why is it that when you have loads of time to kill, the internet decides to pack up for a couple of days and now, to top it all, the satellite on my TV has joined the strike and I no longer have daytime telly to watch!!
We are in the middle of a seasonal lull, work-wise, which often seems to happen just before one of the major holidays and as a result, I have had my first break in some time of more than a couple of days. Wow… on one level it is nice to have a rest, but on the other, it is at this point that I have realised that aside from diving, there is very little to do in Sharm. I guess I could do the real tourist thing, and go along to our pool do a bit of sunbathing, and swimming etc, or even the beach, in fact I think that will be my plan for tomorrow.
