divebunnie

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.