Florida Diver Denied Treatment For Decompression Sickness

A woman from Bay County, Florida is hoping her local medical community will reconsider it’s current practices when it comes to bent divers.

Jeanne McDougall has been scuba diving for 27 years. During a recent dive she suffered her first case of decompression sickness.

“When I came up from my dive, I immediately felt pain in my left arm and the pain didn’t go away – and when the pain didn’t go away and actually got worse, we decided we needed to go into the emergency room,” said the certified diver.

The best treatment is time in a decompression chamber, but hospital personnel did not treat McDougall. “They said that they didn’t service scuba divers for accidents and that the closest place that did was in Mobile, Alabama,” said McDougall.

Bay Medical Sacred Heart said they haven’t been treating diving accidents for several years now because their hyperbaric chamber is not staffed 24 hours, and they only see about four diving injuries per year. It’s apparently been an issue within the local dive community for a number of years.

“That’s totally wrong. If the facility is there and the diver needs it they should go ahead and cooperate,” says Diver’s Den Divemaster Mac McManus.

McDougall said it’s especially troubling since Panama City Beach markets itself to tourists that  are coming to the Panhandle to dive the dozens of artificial reefs and wrecks.

“There’s a huge diving community here, and we invite people to come here and dive in our beautiful waters, and now we don’t have any resources for when accidents happen. It’s important to have those resources because it can mean somebody’s life,” said McDougall.

The hyperbaric chamber in mobile is the closest one able to treat divers suffering from the bends. It’s a three and a half hour ambulance trip from Panama City Beach.

Source: www.wjhg.com