Posted by CalAbDiver on August 07, 2001 at 13:47:47:
In Reply to: Need a lawyer specializing in Personal Injury related to Scuba. posted by Cygal on August 07, 2001 at 12:21:22:
what on earth could have happened to cause it? did you dive really deep? did you stay deep really long? did you come up way too fast like a rocket? did you omit decompression stops? did you get really drunken the night before? this is really interesting.
one day while testing the limits of my own fairly new diving computer, a Suunto Vyper, i did three very deep repetitive dives to 173 fsw, 116 fsw and 107 fsw (as best as i can remember without accessing my dive log), staying at each of those depths for only as long as the Suunto allowed me to without triggering decompression ceilings. it came out to be something like 3 mins, 5 mins, and 7 mins plus descent time, from what i can recall. i made safety stops at 1/2 step egressions on each dive, 3 minutes each. the Suunto required nothing more than a 3 min safety stop at 15 fsw on each dive, although my total dive times were upwards of 20 mins on each dive.
i ended up with a strong case of Type I DCS, and was sick in bed all week with flu-like sypmtoms. thats when i decided to add more personal features to the Suunto dive modes, the original objective having been to evaluate the appropriateness of the dive computer decompression model and settings.
every-body is different (no pun intended) and your body may have been more prone to DCS than your D/M's was. it is really hard to imagine that a D/M trained by anybody would lead a dive that could trigger DCS in a "passenger." it seems like the issue might have been personal factors.
so fess up, how much did you have to drink the night before or the morning of? what about coffee? are you a coffee junkie? did you dehydrate yourself due to caffeine?
these are the kinds of questions the lawyers will pose, only they will be speaking en Espanol, and the judge may only be half awake, having already made up his mind that this gringo [read: you] is boring to him.
jury trial in Mexico??? i think they operate under French Napoleonic Code law: no such thing as juries. the jury idea came from England.