Tag: panic

Cool, Daily Life

The Men In Gray Suits

The dive boat was called the Leatherneck and she was bobbing gently at the dock. We waited to board and watched the crew getting gear together. Regulators attached to tanks and tested. BCs buckled and ready to go. Crates of weight belts waiting. Jokes were flying around in random accents as the crew was from the UK, France, and Australia.

I looked out at the ocean and was grateful the seas were calm. I had a few nerves which is not usual for me. I wasn’t nervous about diving, after all we’d dove with this same crew yesterday. What was different was the depth. I don’t have much experience with deep dives and this one was going to be to a hundred feet, down a wall.

This Caribbean island sits in the middle of nowhere, a product of tectonic plate upswelling. The end result is an island with lots of beautiful shallow water reefs that are prime for scuba diving. But if you go just a little bit further out past the reef… you reach an edge. Go over that edge and it plummets straight down thousands of feet. That’s where we were headed.

The ride out was uneventful. It was already hot and I was looking forward to getting in the water. We reached the buoy and the crew quickly tied up and started throwing out the safety lines and an emergency decompression regulator. One of the crew members gave the safety briefing and then discussed what the dive plan would be. We’d seen beautiful leopard rays yesterday and someone asked if there was a chance we’d see them again. The answer was no, they like the shallower water.

Gear on and adjusted. I shuffled to the stern and waited my turn. Received the all clear, regulator in my mouth, hand on mask, a giant stride and I plunged into the clear blue water. It’s always an odd sensation when you first jump in. Bubbles, sound, a little disorientation while you get yourself sorted out. Oxygen working. Mask clear. Octopus regulator in place. Make sure the BC is fully deflated. Check the dive computer to see that it’s working. Look around to see if I can find the rendezvous point on the bottom. I spotted the divers in front of me and headed down.

Descending down I took care to continually equalize the pressure in my ears. Checked the dive computer a few times to ensure it was tracking correctly. Once at the bottom I did another gear check. I recored a quick video with my camera to ensure it was working. We all sat for a few minutes waiting for all the divers to get down. The dive guide finally gave the signal and we all headed down towards the wall.

The reef is beautiful. Covered in colorful fans, sponges, and all kinds of bizarre looking stuff I can’t identify. Fish of all sorts were feeding and swimming by in small schools. The reef is like going through a series of hallways that kept getting deeper and deeper. Eventually at about eighty feet you could see it. The reef ended and there was nothing but dark blue water. I could see the edge.

Swimming up to it was such a strange feeling. You look down over the ledge and it’s just never ending darkness going down. Just like you’d feel on land, going over the edge goes against common sense. I’m floating and know I’m not going to “fall”… but my brain tells me something different. Took a deep breath and over I went and headed further down.

We continued down to about ninety-five feet and then began traversing across the wall. I was filming everything, while also checking my dive computer about every minute out of paranoia. The dive guide motioned us over to a crevice he was floating near. Once we were all around he took his speargun and speared a lion fish (an invasive species). I was thinking to myself, that was kinda cool since the video camera was running. The guide then pointed behind us.

I turned around and there it was. A shark slowly cruising about 15 feet away.

My oxygen intake suddenly went up about 200%. The guide then flipped the dead lion fish off the speargun and he kicked away. It took about two seconds and the shark came in at mach 2 and devoured the fish. And then suddenly, three more sharks appeared.

I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but when something out of the ordinary happens to you I suddenly have a narrator appear in my head to add running commentary about what’s happening. The conscious part of my brain was in survival mode. Check my gear. Check the depth and how much oxygen I have left. What direction is the boat? Where are the sharks? Scan behind me. Check my oxygen again.

Meanwhile, there’s a voice in my head going “am I really seeing this? am I actually diving at a hundred feet surrounded by sharks? is this real?” I couldn’t believe that this was actually happening and not something I was watching on TV.

Now if you’re a big time diver, this all sounds pretty silly. Obviously the guides deal with sharks all the time and were not worried at all. But for us part-time, every once in a while vacation divers this was a big deal. Kind of like running across a snake – the reptilian part of our brain tells us this is a situation you probably shouldn’t be in.

As we returned to the boat the sharks followed us the entire way, clearly waiting for another tasty fish. I have no idea what fabulous coral or fish we saw on the way back because I was too busy scanning for Jaws who I was convinced was right behind me.

As I neared my decompression stop, I noticed something on the inside of my mask. It looked kind of like an oil slick. Then it dawned on me. My nose was bleeding! I sat at my decompression stop watching the dive computer count down the minutes I had to stay at that depth. Meanwhile my mask was filling up with blood. Normally you’d simply clear your mask, but I knew there were a bunch of sharks swimming around somewhere below me. The last thing I wanted to do was dump a bunch of blood in the water.

I’ve never been to war, been shot at, or have been chased by an angry mob. I have to imagine this feeling was somewhat similar. Your brain is screaming at you to panic. To do something, anything. To get the hell out of Dodge as fast as possible. I could see the boat above me. I still had a few minutes of decompression to complete. The blood in my mask was now covering my nose so I was having to concentrate on not inhaling the blood – I’m sure that would not have been good.

Deep, slow breath. Check the computer. Check for sharks. Check the computer. I could feel blood going down the back of my throat. That coppery taste was making me a bit nauseous. I’m proud of myself. Those few minutes waiting were an eternity. It took every bit of willpower I had to not bolt to the surface and rip off the mask. I kept telling myself that if the navy seals can do this, so can I.

The computer finally gave the all clear and I slowly ascended to the surface. I held on to the boats rear ladder and took off my fins and handed them up to the crew member waiting for me. As I took off my mask he had a surprised look and said (in a heavy Australian accent), “ah hey mate, you’ve got a bit of a bleeder there. You may want to rinse that off.”

And that was that. I survived. No great whites attacked me. I got some great video footage of the sharks. I kept my panic under control. All in all, a successful dive. And… I did another dive an hour later. I’m a regular Jacques Cousteau. Ok, that may be a bit of a stretch. But I had an adventure and a good story to tell.

And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. You’re only here once. Might as well have an adventure or two.

Government, Health

Did We Screw Up?

Sit back and relax for a minute. I have a short tale that might worry you a bit. One that, if true, would prove to be one of the greatest public health blunders in history. It’s about a vaccine. Wait, wait, don’t go… this isn’t an anti-vax tirade or a rant about mandates. It’s a story about what happens when people rush to make a decision without waiting for all the data.

A question – what happens if we created a “leaky vaccine” and pushed it out to billions of people?

Here’s the background. I follow a number of statisticians. Yes, I know I’m a geek. But I like data and charts and graphs. I admit much of the stats are above my head, but I took just enough statistics to semi-sorta understand what I’m reading. Anyway, I first heard about the idea of leaky vaccines from something that Joe Rogan said on his podcast. He, of course, was immediately blasted for pushing tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff. Which, of course, made me want to read more about it. Enter the statisticians who plot and analyze the data and ignore the politicians and media wisdom.

What you want is a sterilizing vaccine. One that creates an immune response powerful enough that it instantly attacks and wipes out the virus in the host before it can replicate and spread. What you don’t want is a “leaky vaccine” that produces an immune response sufficient to protect the host, but isn’t able to prevent a buildup of viral load or transmission. Every day it’s looking more likely that we’ve produced a pretty leaky covid vaccine. This is generally ok for you, the vaccinated individual. Your immune response protects you from getting really sick. But the population as a whole…

Here’s the worrisome part. The data is showing that when a vaccinated person is hit with covid, their viral load and shedding of virus is equal to that of unvaccinated people and lasts for days. And the best part? Because they have an immune response that starts working to protect them, they are generally asymptomatic. Are the lightbulbs starting to go off? In our mad rush to push the vaccine without sufficient testing, we may have just created a bunch of vaccinated asymptomatic superspreaders, happily walking around and infecting the unvaccinated and those unhealthy folks (vaccinated or not) who managed to dodge the bullet during the first covid wave.

Israel, one of the most vaccinated nations on the planet, got hammered with a second wave. Similarly the UK and many highly vaccinated cities in the US. The hospitals are being overrun in many cities, including my own. In many places it’s far worse than the first covid wave. We’re seeing tons of “breakthrough” cases – vaccinated folks who get covid. Unfortunately many of those folks have multiple comorbidities, which is why they got the vaccine in the first place. Their outcomes aren’t great (but still better than without the vaccine). Get vaccinated so you can safely visit your immunocompromised family and friends! We need a vaccine passport so we can safely shop and go to restaurants! The potential irony would be humorous if it wasn’t so tragic.

It’s a catch-22. The vaccine we rushed into the population is clearly good for the individual, but may be bad for society as a whole. Politicians and public health officials panicked and pushed out something without knowing the potential long term impacts. And now that we’re facing skyrocketing case and fatality rates again, the panicked response is boosters! We need boosters in every arm ASAP!

Never mind that the FDA advisory panel voted 16-2 AGAINST authorizing the booster for everyone. The CDC ignored that and did it anyway. The two top virologists at the FDA resigned over the politicization and handling of all this. Yay! Trust the science bitches.

It’s easy to be an armchair quarterback, I get that. But what makes science all sciency, is a willingness to continually examine the data, re-evaluating, questioning, and rethinking your hypothesis if results weren’t what you expected. Unfortunately politics and fear forced us to throw all that out the window. Politics and vanity will keep anyone from saying out loud, “uh guys, we might have screwed up?” Maybe this is a big nothingburger. Maybe in a couple years this will be a minor, annual flu-like annoyance. Or maybe we’ll be on booster #8 and wondering why we keep getting so many mutating variants? My tinfoil hat fits me just fine, thank you.