05/11/2019
During the last year I have been under the radar battling with health problems due to amount of diving I have done in the last 2 decades.
I have decided, due to these problems, to stop teaching diving and focus my energy on other new exciting things.
I would like to thank all my students, colleagues and friends within the industry, it has been an incredible adventure and has been very rewarding. Nevertheless...
I would like to warn my fellow young Instructors of the consequences of carrying cylinders, the hard physical work and of course the stress of disolved gases over longer periods of time, decompression or no decompression and to learn how to manage all this whilst working in Diving.
I have encountered 2 problems, which are under control now :
I now have a hernia in my neck, in between C3 and C4, not a big deal really, many people have this however my hernia has been pressing directly on my spinal chord and causing some damage.
My symptoms were, tingling in the hands, numbness, pain in my elbow, loss of feeling and some minor coordination problems.
When I went to the doctor I was diagnosed with bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome, at this time I did not have any real problems with my neck, sure I had neck pain some days but what diver doesn't ;-)
Needless to say, after the operation on both hands there was no improvement.Cheers guys !!
A few months later, after a dive, I woke up with numbness on the right side of my face.
Alarm of course, AGE the doctors thought.....MRI's, dopplers, X rays, 6 days in the hospital... etc..
This was the moment I found out about that the problem was my hernia in my neck, that had caused "myelopathy", damage to the spinal chord.
Aside of this, the doctor told me they found something in my brain they had to do another SCAN !!!....I was nervous to say at the least.
The MRI came back and I was diagnosed with the disease of the white matter in my brain... WTF ???
Long story short, they found little damaged areas in the white matter of my brain that sometimes older people get.
Other experts had a look at it and due to my relative young age, the disease was discarted and the explanation was that the damage was done due to diving, I was also told that this has nothing to do with decompression diving or recreational diving and one expert even said it was more likely to be from my free diving days (I used to do some serious free diving ).
A few years later now and everything is stable, I can live a normal life, I am fitter than ever and the time has come to call it a day.
I will still be available for consulting and am looking into working or contributing within the diving industry.
Guys, Don't do what I did, don't dive 3-4 times a day for a decade, don't let shop owners abuse you, by carrying 40 cylinders in the morning back and forth..and forget about technical repetitive dives...take it from me !
Thank you all, safe diving and see you in the water on a fun dive ;-)
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