Squeeze

Training day one gave me a great shock.

I felt fine in the morning. My body was not as stiff as I would generally expect after the flights and I had finally eaten and slept fairly well. I still had a slight sore throat from the dry aeroplane air but had consumed a great deal of water.

I started on my goal of relaxing at depth. We set the line to 45m. I planned to do a calm, slow free immersion dive and see how it felt. I took my full breath and left the surface. My neck weight immediately struck my nose clip, knocking it from my face. I held the rope and calmly replaced it, continuing to pull myself downward. I wore little lead, knowing that I could control my ascent and descent with the rope and just taking things easily focussing on relaxing above everything else. I pulled downwards. The dive felt good. I was calm with only one quick moment of negative thoughts on the descent. There were no issues with equalisation and my mouthfill was working fine. It became dark before 40m. I felt a large amount of tape on the rope, thinking it was the markings two meters from the base plate I turned reaching downwards in the attempt to practice a good turn and tap the base plate. I never felt it, but decided to go back. I was buoyant from about 30m on the ascent, and spread my arms to slow myself. The dive was a little under 3 minutes and felt great despite poor technique. The speed was slow but consistent throughout. I surfaced with a lot left in me and feeling great. I took a few hook breaths and completed my surface protocol then started coughing up blood. Large amounts of blood. I couldn't stop. Then I felt like vomiting too as I gagged on the blood. It was hard to breathe and everything was an effort.

Dr Frank was on the platform and did not seem too worried. Megumi swam me and all my stuff back to shore and I breathed oxygen for about 25 mins. By this time I could breathe normally without having to cough. Walking back to the car made me tired. My heart was racing and I could not breathe well. I was wheezing with every breath. Back at the accomodation Mads had a pulseoximeter. My pulse was high (just over 100) and my O2 saturation was low (mid-80s). Herbert called his doctor and I was recommended to breathe pure oxygen, drink a lot of water, rest, be careful while sleeping (or avoid it) to ensure I didn't drown in the fluid in my lungs, take antibiotics, anti-mucous pills, and something else that Sara had in her bag of medicines and kindly shared with me. Luckily within about 4 hours of the accident the wheezing cleared up, my pulse was back down and my O2 saturation was back up to about 96-97%. I had a good feed and went to bed. In the morning my lungs were a little tender on a deep breath but not really ever sore. I was advised to take two days off, and didn't attempt to take any big inhales in that time. By the third day I could fully pack and my lungs felt fine.

This was my first and hopefully last lung squeeze. As freedivers most of us have spat a little blood before, but this was much more scarey as there was a large quantity. We have speculated the causes: pushing too hard too soon (although I think back and wonder why it did not happen earlier if this is the reason - the dive did not feel particularly challenging), not enough recent experience, diving without warm up so suffering larger contractions at depth (however this would surely require my residual volume to have substantially increased over the past year, which is potentially conceivable), fatigue, dehydration, etc. The main issue I have in my mind is that the dive felt good and was not hurried at all. An interesting one was put to me today that it could be some kind reverse squeeze due the dried out nature of my lungs post air travel. It seems feasible and I guess we'll never know. It could have just been the combination of a variety of small things.

I really do not want to go back to doing dives with warm ups and having to wear a thicker wetsuit and more weights. My head goes cloudy towards the end of dives with any kind of additional breathing prior to diving increasing the the chance of black out and I always feel the cold if I am in the water without moving much. I guess I will have to work on that relaxation and staying control of any contractions instead, and start a bit shallower next time.

Today was my first day back in the water. I have sinus issues on the left side, probably the residue of my air travel. It has improved over the course of the day and I am hoping that by tomorrow I will be back to normal and starting to ease slowly into some deeper dives.