In order to obtain our Advanced Rescue Diver certifications, my advanced scuba class spent a full weekend practicing many realistic rescue scenarios.
These very realistic scenarios had everything from unconscious divers at depth, arterial gas embolisms, potential spinal cord injuries, carbon monoxide poisoning, venomous snake bites, lost divers, panicked divers and bystanders, broken bones, possible traumatic brain injuries, and multiple victims.
Here's my full debrief and summary from every rescue this weekend:
This weekend we had our first open water experience for this course, which was rescue weekend. Rescue weekend involved three dives/skills in the morning of the first day with our pool groups, followed by three rescue rotations. The next day included 3 more rescue rotations, and then one mass rescue event attended to by all 3 groups at once.
Prior to this weekend I was a little nervous and apprehensive because my group, though we overall did alright for our first time, didn’t do as great as we had hoped during our Thursday pool session. We didn’t react fast enough, didn’t communicate as well as we needed to, and had a number of mix ups with the oxygen masks and dive boards. This, combined with having no idea what to expect during rescue weekend contributed to those feelings. Additionally, our first dive of the day wasn’t great- personally, I was very positively buoyant which made it very difficult to maintain trim and neutral buoyancy, and multiple people contributed to making the water silty which immediately killed the visibility. I know others of my team had issues with buoyancy and equalization as well. During this dive our skills, at least, went very well- we practiced mask skills, losing our regulator, buddy breathing and air sharing, and emergency assents. However, between the rocky first dive, being very cold, and being on edge waiting for the first real scenario, especially having to be on guard since we didn't know when it would happen, I felt my whole team was not feeling great about the weekend.
As the day went on, though, the day got a lot better and we began to do better working as a team and communicating. Our second dive involved rescuing and unconscious diver on skin diving gear. This went very well, aside from having a quicker ascent caused by having to do it on one breath and not being able to hold my breath long enough to do a slow ascent. After that, we finished with navigation which the entire team did well with. After this we had lunch before beginning the rescue scenarios.
Our first rescue definitely didn’t go perfectly, but overall, I was happy with how we did for our first time, and it was a big improvement from Thursday. The scenario was a panicked diver at the surface and her dive buddy being unconscious at the bottom of the springs. I got and towed the first diver to the shore and helped get her gear off before passing her off and going back out to help the team members who had gone after the unconscious diver. I helped them tow her, give ventilations, and remove gear. Then I helped get her on the dive board and carry her up two flights of stairs, where I assisted with CPR. We did well with reacting quickly, staying calm, getting the divers onto the dive board and up the stairs, and did well with CPR. What could’ve improved was being more efficient with the oxygen and finding the right mask, communicating- especially between groups-, and making sure we had effective breaths.
The next rescue went a lot better than the first. For this one there was a girl who ran up to us because her brother had broken his leg and hit his head. I assisted Coral, the bystander/sister while my team members did a great job caring for her brother. Coral was trying really hard to get to her brother and was yelling which wouldn’t have helped him, and she likely would have interfered with the first aid care, so I had to get her away from him. She tried a few times to get away from me but I was able to keep her away from the scene, even having to use physical restraint to prevent her from interfering. I was able to get a medical history on her brother and find out the details of the situation. Then I focused on keeping her distracted and calm, so I made sure she was turned away, talked about things other than her brother, and told her the best way to help was to help me watch for the ambulance so we could lead them to her brother. I thought I did well working with the bystander, and though I didn’t witness my team working with her brother it seemed successful from the debrief. One important thing to change would’ve been having someone come over to me to get his medical history or any other important info I found out, since I couldn’t leave her to tell them and definitely couldn’t bring her with me.
On our third dive there was an unconscious diver at the surface of the spring. We sent one diver in after her first, followed by a second diver who was gearing up. This didn’t go quite as planned because the diver got taken downstream quickly by the current, quicker than our instructors had intended. We sent a third diver after them to help. I got the oxygen and when we got back we made the decision to move farther down so that they didn’t have to tow the diver as far up the stream. Once we got her up we did well, we just needed to remember gloves and drying her off before applying the AED, but we did the other skills very well.
After the first day I felt much less apprehensive about the scenarios because we had successfully done the skills many times and had been able to adapt well to different scenarios. Throughout the day my team and I improved a lot, both in our skills, identifying when to use what skills, and in working together and communicating. We felt a lot more confident in our response skills and teamwork.
The third day was very successful. We didn’t make very many mistakes, and they typically were only minor things. The first scenario involved a snake bite victim. I towed the snake bite victim in and did a good job in recognizing he was panicky and deflating and getting behind him so he couldn’t pull at my equipment or grab me. Once I got him to shore my teammates did a bandage and I got information from Anna who was working the bystander to see if the bystander had any important information. The only major error we made was not doing a compression bandage because we didn’t associate that type of bandage with a water moccasin bite.
For our next scenario we had an unconscious diver at the surface and one at the bottom of the spring. I went after the diver on the surface and towed them back to shore while doing breaths as my partner took off their gear. Then I worked with 3 other team members to carry them up the stairs. The rest of the team brought the unconscious diver up to land. They were foaming and had blood coming from their mouth. We knew this was bad but didn’t immediately recognize this as AGE. The surface diver who I was with at first had a pulse and was breathing so we monitored her and gave her oxygen. Then she crashed so we switched her oxygen mask and I started CRP. Someone brought over and AED which we applied. That was when the other diver came up, but she wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. They did CPR, and we switched masks as soon as our diver became weakly breathing, however we couldn’t switch the AED even when the other diver needed it since we only had one set. We communicated very well through this process even when split into two groups (because of the set up of the springs, the victims couldn't be right by each other)
Our last dive had one panicky diver and a “lost” dive buddy who was unconscious at the bottom of Catfish Hotel (the second spring). I ran to get oxygen and the dive board, and when they got back, they had the first panicky diver who I helped get to the top of the stairs. I stayed with him and provided support by monitoring vitals, keeping him calm and turned away once his dive buddy/sister was carried next to him (since they both required oxygen and I couldn’t bring him elsewhere), doing a neurological assessment, distracting him, monitoring symptoms, etc. My team had some trouble because Anna went down to get the diver but her buddy couldn’t follow because he was too positively buoyant. The diver was very overweighted (to simulate a larger victim) and Ana couldn’t lift her so she had to come back to the surface and get help. She didn’t think she should drop the weight belt since this was a simulation and we didn’t want to lose gear, and she didn’t think to manually inflate the BCD underwater. Other than that the team did very well in the rest of the rescue.
After this we had lunch, and then there was the mass emergency that we were not expecting (we were told we were only doing 3 simulations that day) where multiple divers were unconscious due to carbon monoxide poisoning. I went after one diver with Brooke, we brought them to the stairs, helped carry that diver, and then I did CPR and assisted with ventilations. Once I switched CPR with someone, I went back down to help carry another diver up the stairs. It was very crowded so we had to get some people to move to make room close enough to oxygen for us to use it. I provided ventilations through this process and helped with CPR once we laid the diver down. Overall this scenario went very well and we all worked together even though I hadn’t worked with someone outside of my team before. Communication was also great throughout this.
The weekend as a whole went very well. My team (team Duckweed!) was great. There was no team member who wasn’t always ready and willing to help, no one was too controlling, we all did great listening to one another, letting each other rotate roles, trusting one another, having no issue with us expressing any critique/reminders to one another, and we did very well with communication. We were all capable with all the skills and willing to do whatever needed to be done in the situation. There was also no blame whatsoever in the cases that could’ve gone better. There wasn’t a single disagreement among our team throughout the entire weekend, and I would happily work with any of my team members again! After this weekend I feel much more prepared to handle real life situations, feel confident in the skills I learned, and also feel more prepared and confident as a diver. I have also gotten very comfortable with gear and taking it on and off very efficiently.
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