04
October
October
Diving at Camia II: Injured Eardrum
No comments Posted in: UncategorizedTagged with boracay, camia II, diving, injury
The only real accident was me blowing my eardrum at about 20 meters and not realizing it. The Camia II is a purposely sunken fish transport ship off Boracay with 6 or 7 years of growth on it for an artificial reef project.
We were going down and had some AOW students that were having a troubling day of diving. First it was lack of weights then near-panic at mask clearing. Couldn’t seem to get them down the line in a reasonable amount of time; slow-slow-slow. By the time we hit bottom, I had used 50 bar while doing nothing more than hovering to the side slowly descending as they eventually followed.
But around 20m, I went to equalize and it locked up..pushed and instantly thought I felt sinus pressure (oh crap) so I gently pushed again and it snapped open with a fury! jeeeeze…. not another deep water-in-ear day. Oh well.
We continued the dive as these 3 people floundered all over the place. Sure, they had moments of calm and good profile… but there was an awful lot of doggie-paddling at 25m, and for the first time, I saw someone trying to ‘walk’ normally on the bottom with fins. There were arms and legs everywhere. I lost track of how many times I was kicked in the head. A single memory kept surfacing, a quote by Rocky about some divers one day: “… I mean, C’mon! there’s an entire ocean out there, you don’t have to swim on top of me…” For a few minutes, I grabbed the guys 1st stage from above and pushed him around just to keep him off me. I have no idea where he was intending to swim and you couldn’t tell by his arm/leg movements, I didn’t give him a choice and he didn’t seem to ever notice what I was doing- so no foul. These people definitely need a lot more shallow/safe dives before going deep again. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it until today.
On the way up, my ear starts gurgling as I notice my sinuses auto-equalizing…but hold on, there’s also noise coming from my sinuses and I can feel pressure in there changing fast. This cant be good. Back on the surface, my hearing is off kilter.
I was gonna just ignore it and chalk it up to water deep in the ear since the pain was nothing more than a regular hard-equalizing pop…. but Dustin tells me to see the clinic right then. Dont worry about the gear, just change and go. So I did and found out my eardrum was perforated. She kept asking me if it happened before and I didn’t think anything of it at the time but now suspect she saw some scar tissue in there.
As of right now, 10:40pm, everytime I swallow, open mouth, heavy breath, etc… theres a constant gurgling in my ear. The cute Dr Yap says it might be a month or so before it heals. Hopefully. Perhaps. Until then, no diving, swimming, or pointing the showerhead at my ear. Everything sounds nasal and muffled on that side.
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I saw this alot being at the diveshop there with customers. Sucks dude. It’s happy hour for a month now!! Back to the drawing board….
Oct 5, 2008 at 12:58 AM
Time to go drink that ear pain away brother hahahaha
Oct 5, 2008 at 8:00 AM