A Case of Nitrogen Narcosis

It was only a week ago that I wrote a post about narcosis, and this weekend I dealt with my first example of quite serious narcosis. We were diving at Playa Chica, here in Lanzarote, and here’s what happened:

My buddy was an experienced diver, but he hadn’t dived for several months, so we agreed to do a check out at 10 meters before heading deeper onto the house reef. His buoyancy  was a little off, but everything else was fine, so off we went. As we reached the drop off and descended though 20, then 25 meters, I watched him carefully and all seemed well.

It was when we hit 30 meters that he started to act strangely. I saw him grab his contents gauge and stare at it for what seemed a long time. I was also conscious that he was continuing to sink slowly in a upright position. I signaled him to tell me how much air he had, but he just continued to look at his gauge. It was as if he couldn’t get his brain to work properly. I signaled to ask if he was OK, and after an age he gave me the sign for a problem in the head. I moved close to him to check his eyes, and they conveyed confusion and fear, so I took both his hands (which were shaking) and we finned upwards, with me watching his eyes.

Photo Credit

At 25 meters, he suddenly relaxed and I could see the change in his eyes – they came back to normal and he signaled that he was OK. It was dramatic the way he went in seconds from being scared and confused, to being back in control. I signaled that we should stay at 25 meters, and told the other divers that we would hover over them while they carried on exploring the reef.

After about five minutes my buddy told me that he wanted to descend again, so we did, and I watched him very carefully as we went through 30 meters again, and all was fine.

We had a good dive, seeing a couple of huge grouper, a playful spider crab and one of my favorite fish, an Angel Shark. The shark was resting on the sea bed, well covered with sand and was spotted by another diver. We had the pleasure of seeing it move off – it’s amazing the way the dorsal fins unfold, the sand is shrugged off and with one whole body flick, the shark is gone and way.

This was a good lesson for me about narcosis – it can strike at any time and can come on very quickly, but by taking the right action it can be “cured” just as quickly.