It was my intention to write a long comprehensive epilogue of the WC 2023 series, but as always the IG word police cut me short and then I was so busy with work, training, home and attending to the many needs of my dog from hell.
Since I got so tired of writing long Instagram post and then spend hours trying to cut it short or it won’t fit the IG word limit , I said to myself, oh what the hell, I’ll start a real blog again. So that’s where I’m at now, lost into the WordPress jungle. But now I can write my epilogue in peace, and tell you all about this shocking revelation: even I could squeeze!
(for the record, I will be using the word lung “squeeze” and “barotrauma” interchangeably)
In fact, in 21 years of freediving I have never once squeezed, despite having (unwillingly) engaged in a lot of stupid practices. We just didn’t know any better then. I don’t think I met many people, if not no one ever, who ever managed to get past 40, 50, 60 without some degree of depth related injury to the lungs at some point or another. Then I got covid in Roatan and the fun started!
After 1 week out of the water, unfortunately I decided that I couldn’t possibly skip another day of diving and I threw myself back in the water against my body’s will. I did a couple of dives with terrible feelings and finally a 91 dive that got me the 1st place in the Caribbean Cup. The dive itself was fairly easy but at the end I felt out of breath for a while. Many people would recognise this as a symptom of lung barotrauma, but not me because I never experienced that. So after my dive I stayed in the water to look at some of my Italian teammates dives when all of a sudden I had a strong urge to cough and felt that nice feeling of old phlegm coming up my throat and being an extremely well mannered lady, I covered my mouth with my hand and when I looked at it I saw a lot of red stuff in it. I stared at it in horror and surprise not even understanding what was happening for a few seconds, when it finally dawned on me, that bloody hell (literally) I actually squeezed!
Other than the throat irritation followed by the coughing I had no other symptoms, in fact my blood saturation and my heart rate were normal, I could take both a full breath and do a full exhale without feeling anything strange. End of the story, a few days later I went back to training, at that point I felt 90% recovered from my leftover Covid symptoms and felt relatively strong again; I did a deep dive, took a few precautions and luckily I haven’t experienced any other problem with my lungs.
Why am I bringing this up, especially when basically everyone else is very careful at hiding their lung barotrauma from others, especially in the competition environment?
Because no matter what you know, or what you think you know, about yourself, about your body, about physiology, you never really know for sure. I have dived for so many years as if I was squeeze-proof because my experience taught me that no matter what I do I won’t squeeze, and there I was, getting caught being wrong once again. I now am more careful, also thanks to my hypochondria that always whispers in my ear how am I going to die of this or that disease, and now I can add lung barotrauma to the list of the things that will kill me. I know that as long as I don’t dive while I’m sick it’s not so likely that I will have another squeeze, but at the same time there are a few things I can do to mitigate the risk, in my case:
– I now try to remember to exhale a little air just below the surface if I had done a lot of packing;
– in free immersion I try to do more gentle pulls in the deeper part of the ascent.
– if possible I don’t pull up the rope or do safety just after my dive if I feel a little more tired than usual.
– I only reverse pack at depth if the air comes up easy, and if not I’ll stop and turn around ( I often run out of mouthfill and I reverse pack the last 10-20 meters of my descent ; for people that are prone to squeeze this can be a very dangerous habit, but others reverse pack the whole way instead of using mouthfill).
Fun fact and proof that often our senses are tricking us: one day in Roatan I’m in the kitchen cooking banana bread for the Italian team, I look out the window and I see a zebra in the neighbour garden. No i’m not drunk and yes, know there ain’t no zebras in Roatan, but that’s what my eyes are looking at. Then the zebra moves but her stripes move a different direction, until I realise that’s the usual horse under the palm tree shade. Check photo below, and no, it’s not photoshopped 🙂
UW photo credit Jacques de Vos
